Chat with recruiter followed by coding phone screen. The phone screen involved 30min of coding where I was asked to implement a directed graph class with topological sort + cycle detection. The interviewer was very opinionated about how I wrote the directed graph class even though I had an equivalent time/memory implementation. I tried to explain it to him but he only seemed to understand one way of implementing it, so I did it his way in the end. The second part was to write topological sort using the data structure. No problem solving, he literally just wanted to know if I've memorized that algorithm or not. I'm sure they'll be able to find someone who's memorized it, but I doubt they'll be a good ML Research Scientist. This was an unreasonable questions given the time constraint in my opinion.

I applied to the position through a referral and had an initial conversation with a recruiter a few days after submitting my application. While the process began smoothly, there was a noticeable delay in scheduling the technical interview. It took some time to coordinate and schedule the interview. Eventually, the interview was scheduled, and I was able to continue with the process.