Future DeepMind researcher shares the interview playbook that won offers from Meta and Cohere
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-07-27
A long interview-style blog from future DeepMind researcher Silvia Sapora describes how she navigated ML job interviews and received offers from DeepMind, IsomorphicLabs, Cohere, Meta, and an unnamed startup.
- She says a strong baseline for getting responses is often 3+ first-author papers plus an internship or industry stint.
- Her prep centered on role-specific practice: about 150 medium LeetCode problems, handwritten flashcards, and timed implementations of Transformer, attention, FlashAttention, and backprop.
- She also recommends using an LLM as a mock interviewer before each real interview, and treats technical prep, negotiation, and company selection as separate skills.
- The piece is as much an emotional account as a tactical one, emphasizing that interviews can be brutal and still do not define a researcher’s worth.
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