Pinterest Machine Learning Engineer interview experience

That technical session didn’t start cleanly—no one showed up for the interview, and when I reached out, HR couldn’t really help because of poor coordination between their EU and US teams.

When the meeting finally happened about a week later, the interviewer pulled me into typical ML fundamentals rather than spending time on the projects I’d worked on. We covered questions like L1 versus L2 regularization, including the underlying math and why L1 leads to feature sparsity, and we also discussed the vanishing gradient problem and what kinds of activation functions can mitigate it.

I ended