Becoming an MLE at FAANG: What you need to know

I’m Shivam Anand, currently leading machine learning engineering (MLE) efforts at Meta, focused on integrity, recommendation, and search systems. Over the past decade, I’ve applied state-of-the-art ML to some of the toughest challenges in big tech—from scaling anti-abuse systems at Google Ads to rebuilding ML systems for Integrity enforcement at Facebook.

I’ve seen first-hand how the nature of ML work varies massively across team types and career paths. This guide is my attempt to map that space for others navigating (or considering) careers in ML—especially those targeting roles in big tech. I will cover different ML team types, the kinds of roles you’re likely to see on those teams, how interview processes vary for ML roles, and how to make the lateral move from a software engineering role to an MLE one.

How well do LeetCode ratings predict interview performance? Here's the data.

Have you ever wondered if you should spend more time on LeetCode, participate in those contests, or focus on solving harder problems? A popular Reddit post suggests you need 700+ questions and a LeetCode rating between 1800-2000 to pass FAANG interviews. Is this really what the data supports? To answer these questions and more, we looked at our users' LeetCode ranks and ratings and tied them back to interview performance on our platform and whether those users worked at FAANG.

In this post, we’ll share what we’ve learned.

The other half, or why interviewers aren't always great and how to make them better

It is high time we start talking about interviewing. I know it seems like we are talking about interviewing all the time, but we are usually talking about only one half of the equation: How to be a good candidate. What about the other half? What about the interviewer?

In the last decade, there has been an explosion of attention for candidates and how to improve their interview performance. This stands in stark contrast to the preparation of the interviewer. If you are lucky, your interviewer might have gotten a two hour class on how to ask only bona fide work related questions and has sat through two shadow interviews. Maybe they have even done a few interviews! Consequently, there is a lot of bad interviewing being done. That needs to change.

My manager is not promoting me. What should I do? Advice from an eng manager at Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft.

I’ve been an engineering manager at Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. I’ve been in many promotion reviews, and here is my advice on what it takes to get a promotion.

Want to work from home? That’ll be $46,282.

Software engineering jobs come with a lot of perks. But that doesn’t mean our jobs are perfect. Work requires us to commute, reduces the time we can spend with family, increases our stress levels, and forces us to deal with teammates we don't gel with. And sometimes we work for companies with questionable morals and use technologies we don’t enjoy. 

For some of us, it’s worth trading cash for a job that fits into our lives better. But how much cash?

To figure this out, we surveyed our users about times they took jobs with lower compensation, why they did it, and how much money they left on the table. We have the numbers!

How hard is it to cheat in technical interviews with ChatGPT? We ran an experiment.

Does ChatGPT make it easy to cheat in technical interviews? To find out, we ran an experiment where we instructed interviewees on our platform to use ChatGPT in their interviews, unbeknownst to their interviewers. The results were surprising, but as a preview, know this: companies need to change the types of interview questions they are asking—immediately.

How software engineering behavioral interviews are evaluated at Meta (from an ex-Meta manager)

Hi, I’m Lior. I spent close to five years at Meta as a software engineer and engineering manager. During my time there I conducted more than 150 behavioral interviews. In this post, I’ll be sharing what Meta looks for in a behavioral interview, and how we evaluated candidates.

Does communication matter in technical interviewing? We looked at 100K interviews to find out.

The interviewing.io platform has hosted and collected feedback from over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones. It’s generally accepted that to pass a technical interview, you have to not only come up with a solution to the problem (or at least make good headway), but you also have to do a good job of articulating your thoughts, explaining to your interviewer what you’re doing as you’re doing it, and coherently discussing tradeoffs and concepts like time and space complexity. But how important is communication in technical interviews, really? We looked at the data, and it turns out that talk is cheap. Read on to find out how and why.

Hamtips, or why I still run the Technical Phone Screen as the Hiring Manager

“Hamtips” stands for “Hiring Manager Technical Phone Screen.” This combines two calls: the Technical Phone Screen (TPS), which is a coding exercise that usually happens before the onsite, and the HMS call, which is a call with the Hiring Manager. By combining these two steps you shorten the intro-to-offer by ~1 week and reduce candidate dropoff by 5-10%. It’s also a lot less work for recruiters playing scheduling battleship. Finally, Hiring Managers will, on average, be better at selling working at the company – it’s kind of their job.

Technical phone screen superforecasters

“The new VP wants us to double engineering’s headcount in the next six months. If we have a chance in hell to hit the hiring target, you seriously need to reconsider how fussy you’ve become.”

It’s never good to have a recruiter ask engineers to lower their hiring bar, but he had a point. It can take upwards of 100 engineering hours to hire a single candidate, and we had over 50 engineers to hire. Even with the majority of the team chipping in, engineers would often spend multiple hours a week in interviews. Folks began to complain about interview burnout. Also, fewer people were actually getting offers; the onsite pass rate had fallen by almost a third, from ~40% to under 30%. This meant we needed even more interviews for every hire. Visnu and I were early engineers bothered most by the state of our hiring process. We dug in. Within a few months, the onsite pass rate went back up, and interviewing burnout receded. We didn’t lower the hiring bar, though. There was a better way.

I’ve conducted over 600 technical interviews on interviewing.io. Here are 5 common problem areas I’ve seen.

I recently conducted my 600th interview on interviewing.io (IIO). I’d like to share lessons learned, why I approach interviews the way that I do, and shed some light on common problem areas I see happen in technical interviews. Every interviewer on the platform is different, and so your results may vary. We have some excellent folks helping out on the platform, and have a wonderful community working to better ourselves.

6 red flags I saw while doing 60+ technical interviews in 30 days

What is the one thing you would look out for if you had to join a company? Sometime between January and February 2020, I wanted to change jobs and was looking to join a new company. This, among other reasons, led me to embark on a marathon of technical interviews – 60+ technical interviews in 30 days. Doing that many number of interviews in such a short time meant I had an interesting mix of experiences from the various companies I interviewed with, each with their unique culture and values that often reflected in the way their interviews were conducted, intentionally or not.