Machine Learning Scientist Interview Questions

467 machine learning scientist interview questions shared by candidates

You have a partially observable environment with evolving dynamics (non-stationary transition and reward distributions). Logged data comes from multiple behavior policies. How would you estimate the expected return of a new policy and safely improve it, without deploying it, while accounting for uncertainty in both the dynamics and the behavior policies?
avatar

Senior Machine Learning Scientist

Interviewed at Grafton Sciences

5
Oct 17, 2025

You have a partially observable environment with evolving dynamics (non-stationary transition and reward distributions). Logged data comes from multiple behavior policies. How would you estimate the expected return of a new policy and safely improve it, without deploying it, while accounting for uncertainty in both the dynamics and the behavior policies?

You will be asked a wide range of ML-related questions (ML theory, PyTorch, CNNs, etc.). You will also be asked to code towards the end of the 1 hour session (Leetcode medium). Most of these questions have well-defined answers (e.g., how do you disable gradient computation in PyTorch) while others are more open-ended (e.g., how would you use unlabeled data to boost the performance of your supervised tasks). My major complaints are with these open-ended questions. The interviewer had specific answers in mind and would not understand/accept alternative approaches. The depth of the interviewer's ML knowledge is also questionable as the interviewer did not understand how pretrained networks can be used as feature extractors. The interviewer also asked about variational auto-encoder without knowing the underlying probabilistic formulation. Overall, a negative experience.
avatar

Machine Learning Scientist

Interviewed at Varian Medical Systems

3.9
Dec 28, 2021

You will be asked a wide range of ML-related questions (ML theory, PyTorch, CNNs, etc.). You will also be asked to code towards the end of the 1 hour session (Leetcode medium). Most of these questions have well-defined answers (e.g., how do you disable gradient computation in PyTorch) while others are more open-ended (e.g., how would you use unlabeled data to boost the performance of your supervised tasks). My major complaints are with these open-ended questions. The interviewer had specific answers in mind and would not understand/accept alternative approaches. The depth of the interviewer's ML knowledge is also questionable as the interviewer did not understand how pretrained networks can be used as feature extractors. The interviewer also asked about variational auto-encoder without knowing the underlying probabilistic formulation. Overall, a negative experience.

Viewing 351 - 360 interview questions

Glassdoor has 467 interview questions and reports from Machine learning scientist interviews. Prepare for your interview. Get hired. Love your job.