Waymo Machine Learning Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The whole thing had four interviews, each about 45 minutes, all on video. The virtual onsite was made up of 2 LeetCode style questions and 1 ML design question plus 1 ML basic question. First up was a chill chat with a research scientist. He told me about his work and what Waymo research is generally about, saying they look for research interns who want to publish papers. Then he asked me about my background and papers, maybe asking for some details. It was pretty laid back, and we didn't go super deep, so I'm not totally sure what the point was.

Started with a recruiter screen. Then there was a first technical interview, a coding interview that was supposed to be 45 minutes. They called it an ML coding interview in the email, but the attached Waymo prep PDF said it was typical DSA/LeetCode style. I emailed the recruiter (Tony W.) for clarification but got ghosted. I asked to reschedule and they did it the same day, which was weird since he ghosted my emails. Someone else from Waymo said their recruiter prepped them well, the total opposite of my experience. An hour before the coding interview, they switched the interviewer. The new interviewer spent 15 minutes asking about my CV and projects. Then they spent time copying the coding problem into CoderPad. It wasn't LeetCode or ML coding, but some strange data-wrangling task without text explanations. I tried to figure out the code and data format, asking the interviewer for help, but couldn't understand his explanations at all. Hope your experience is better.

I applied and then a recruiter reached out. First, there was a culture fit check, followed by a phone screen that involved coding. After that, I had an onsite interview. The onsite included two coding rounds, one on ML modeling, one on ML system design, and a behavioral interview. Everyone was really nice and helpful throughout.