10/24/2019 My Machine Learning Research Jobhunt – Generalized Error – Machine Learning Researcher

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Machine Learning Researcher

My Machine Learning Research Jobhunt

In the last few months, I interviewed at a number of companies in Europe for an AI
research position. I wasn’t able to find much information online, so maybe sharing my
experiences will be useful to others.

For context: I just finished my PhD, and have publications at all the big Deep Learing
conferences (NIPS, ICML, ICLR), and in journals that specialize in ML application fields. I
come from a no-name university, my h-index is somewhere in the 5-15 range and my
citation count is somewhere in the 500-1500 range. I’ve done an internship at a FAANG AI
research lab before. This is the first time I’ve been job hunting, so I might have missed a
few obvious things, or state things that are obvious to people who’ve done this before –
sorry.

Important Resources
In my experience, almost all advice about interviewing for Software Engineering jobs
transfer very well to ML research positions, as those jobs are at the same companies. I
cannot recommend the following blogs enough, they’re a gold mine and I recommend
reading them once before you even start applying to companies, once more before the
actual salary negotiations start, and a last time while you’re in the middle of your
negotiations:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer-ee17cccbdab6
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-negotiation-
c46bb9bc7dea

Companies

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I only interviewed at industrial research labs in global corporations. No start-ups, no

smaller companies. Also, I restricted my search to Europe, pay scales & benefits are
different elsewhere. There are a lot of great companies that hire AI scientists in the region:
Amazon has an ML research lab in Berlin, Apple has ML jobs in Paris, Google Brain has
labs in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris and Zurich, Facebook AI Research and DeepMind are
both present in London and Paris, Microsoft Research and IBM Research both sit in
Cambridge and Zurich, nVidia has labs in Berlin, Helsinki and Munich, Twitter has an office
in London, and Uber is hiring Research Scientists in Paris. Aside from this, there are a lot
of interesting positions in more applied fields, such Automotive (VW/AUDI have a research
lab in Munich), Drug Design (Benevolent AI sits in London, and Merck, Bayer, J&J and
Astra Zenica are all looking for ML people) or Finance (Citadel and Jane Street both have
offices in London). Wandering job booths at conferences you’ll also encounter some other
very interesting research positions at cool companies. E.g. Bloomberg (London), Bosch
(Stuttgart), Criteo (Paris, Grenoble), or Disney Research (Zurich). And there’s likely a lot
more out there that I did miss.

While I did have some favorites in mind, I applied to as many companies as possible:
without competing offers, you will be at a severe disadvantage in your salary negotiations.
And the interview practice helps a ton. The difference in adrenaline between my first
interviews vs my last ones was similar to giving a talk in front of 3k people vs talking to
your colleagues during lunch. Additionally, you will definitely bomb some of your interviews
– either you or the interviewer will have a bad day, or you get questions about one of your
blind spots, or the position turns out not to align with your interests, or something else
goes terribly wrong. For example, for reasons unknown to me, nvidia ghosted me in the
middle of their interview process: their interviewer just didn’t show up to a pre-arranged
video conference call, and they’ve been ignoring all my emails since. I still have no clue
why. But I was glad I didn’t put all my eggs in one basket.

However, I discovered that the main advantage of interviewing at more companies was
something else: I was getting to know more companies. There are a lot of cool jobs out
there that I didn’t even think of! Some of the most interesting positions (and best offers)
were at companies that I didn’t initially consider top choices. It turns out that some my
“safety picks” were a really good fit for me. Even if that might not be the case for you,
getting to talk to a lot of teams about their current projects and their visions for the future is
very inspiring and illuminating.

I applied to about half of the companies I listed above, either for Research Scientist or
Research Engineer roles, and most of those applications ended up in job offers. My whole
job hunt took a long time (half a year from my very first application to me accepting an
offer), and was very exhausting: those months were a blur of airports, hotels and interview
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rooms, followed by months of phone calls and salary negotiations with HR people. Don’t
expect to get much work done during this period. As a colleague put it: “your mind is
constantly preoccupied with when you’re hearing back from this or that recruiter, there’s no
mental capacity left to think about ICML”. Yet it all paid of tremendously: I learned a lot,
collected a lot of new perspectives, and was able to negotiate a much higher salary than if
I’d gone with the first “dream job” offer.

Interview Process
The interview process was very similar across all companies. After receiving my CV, the
companies would invite me to do a brief screening to see if I was a suitable candidate,
usually in the form of one or two phone interviews of one hour each. Then, I usually got
invited for on-site interviews: a full day of interview after interview with various people, at
the company’s offices. These usually started with me giving a presentation about my PhD
research. Followed by individual interviews of ~1 hour each, either with people from the
team I was interviewing for, or with researchers/engineers in similar roles from other teams.
Typically, I’d meet different people for each interview, so by the end of the day I had often
met most of the people in my potential future team. Almost all interviewers made time for
me to ask questions about the position, team or company. I liked asking questions about
work-life balance, difficult processes or about things they didn’t like at their current job. I
found that most people would answer these questions honestly and bluntly, which led to a
number of poignant, preposterous, pathetic, and priceless insights into what my future
might look like; from funny stories about the office dog or the team lead who assured me
that “we do work hard, but you’ll probably be able to cut back to less than 60h / week in
your 2nd or 3rd year here” or the guy who told me he was under so much stress that he’s
thinking about quitting (while still assuring me that “the office is really great, you’ll love it
here!”) to the guy who was so excited about his own research that he forgot to ask me any
technical questions, and instead just stream-of-conciousnessed his current breakthrough
to me… These were great opportunities to learn more about the company and the position
I was interviewing for. Definitely do take the time to ask some good questions!

Types of interviews
There’s a couple of different types of interviews that I’ve encountered over and over again.
Some of these are easy to prepare for (e.g. coding or behavioral interviews), while it’s
almost impossible to prepare for others. All companies had a different mix of interviews:
several companies made me an offer without ever verifying that I could code my way out of
a paper bag (i.e., no coding questions), while others never verified that I knew what an
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expected value was (i.e., no math questions). Some gave me more theoretical problems,
others more practical ones; at most companies, it was a mix of both. In general, I found that
people were always willing to give me hints if I was stuck. I think they often under-specified
some of their problems on purpose, just to see how I would react, and were eager to help
or discuss details with me. It never felt like an adversarial process, it was more like a
discussion between colleagues.

“Tell us about your research”

A lot of interviews simply consisted of me talking about my past work. The interviewer
would pick a paper from my CV and ask me to talk about it, or sometimes they would let
me pick which project I would like to talk about. Some interviewers would only ask shallow
questions, while others went fairly deep into it (“You assume heteroscedasticity in theorem
3, but never justify it throughout the paper. Why did you think this is a valid assumption,
and what are its implications?”). But we never went “math-level deep”: there are one or
two tricky proofs in papers I’ve co-authored that I dreaded being brought up; but luckily all
interviewers were as afraid of talking about such things as I was. I was mostly asked about
papers that I first-authored, but people didn’t mind me discussing papers that I merely co-
authored, either.

Coding interview

The typical software engineering interviews that Google or Facebook are so famous for:
you need to come up and implement with the solution to some puzzle of algorithmic nature.
Usually in a language of your own choosing, e.g. C++ or Python. There were several
iterations of each problem: you first come up with a simple solution and implement it, and
then the interviewer gives you additional restrictions or asks for a more efficient solution.
Afterwards, people would usually expected me to discuss time or memory complexity, or to
discuss potential test cases for my implementation. A lot of the times, the discussion would
then go towards even harder versions of the same problem. in several instances,
interviewers admitted afterwards that they themselves didn’t know how to solve the last
iteration of the problem that they’d given me, they just wanted to see if I could come up
with something, or how I’d react to an unsolvable problem. I found that these interviews
were the easiest to prepare for: going through something like Princton’s Algorithms, Part 1
and Part 2 and doing some problems on leetcode.com should be enough to prepare for
this.

Machine Learning interviews

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Some interviews simply tested general ML knowledge. They covered things that a normal
ML class at university would cover, too. These types of interviews were typically split into
two parts. The first part being some general knowledge ML questions (how do you
regularize a deep network? Where does boosting come up in Random Forest training?
What would be two suitable classification algorithms when prediction speed is more
important than accuracy? How would you go about grouping documents into semantic
groups by their content? Can you discuss the connection between Gaussian Mixture
Models and k-means?). There was often a second part that consisted of “ML coding”,
where I had to implement some standard ML algorithm. For example, I remember
implementing inference/pruning of a decision tree, k-means and k-NN. I was typically given
~30-45 minutes to implement these (and again, talk about efficiency and maybe possible
test cases).

“So we have this problem…”

In some interviews, I was just told about a project the interviewer is currently working on,
and then they would pick my brain on how to solve this (“we’re trying to find duplicate
videos in our video data base”, “we need to rank these millions of entities according to
some vaguely specified criterion, and do so with sub-second latency”, “we have very little
labelled data and want to use GANs to augment our data set, what’s the best way?”, …).
There’s no really good way to prepare for those, but I got the feeling that people mainly
wanted to get a feel for my thinking process. So these interviews were less about coming
up with the perfect algorithm, and more about brainstorming or discussing trade-offs, even
if your initial idea was completely off.

Behavioral Interviews

Whenever I was told that I’d be be interviewed by some person in HR, what followed was
almost always a Behavioral Interview. Luckily, the questions are almost always the same,
so you can prepare for them well ahead of time. One company even sent me a booklet
about their “company values” and told me I’d be interviewed about how I reflect those
values in my daily life. Just google “Behavioral interviews” and you’ll find lots of resources.
All in all, I didn’t see these questions too often, maybe 3 or 4 times during my whole job
hunt.

Others

Some companies had me go through some interviews that I’ve not encountered in any
other company. Like math puzzles (this text is a good start), or a “paper discussion”

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interview where I was given a paper in advance to read through (typically from a research
area I wasn’t very familiar with). Or a multiple-hour written exam on the fundamentals of
statistics, probability and optimization theory :)

Salary Negotiations
After my interviews, a recruiter at the company would be in touch, and give me “the good
news”. I was always straight forward about interviewing at several places, and every
recruiter was very accommodating and understanding that I would only be ready to discuss
further steps once I had heard back from all companies. Then the salary negotiations
started. A lot of ink has been spilled on that topic already. Definitely check the linked blog
posts at the beginning of the text for more some general pointers.

Naturally, salary varies extremely with region. Salaries in ML track software engineering
salaries pretty well, so levels.fyi or GlassDoor give a good idea on what kind of salaries to
expect. Blind also has a lot of good information both about salaries and the general
interview process, if you can handle the amount of toxicity there. However, the numbers
you’ll find on those sites are heavily biased towards Silicon Valley, and America in general.
I was able to find some European salaries on those sites, but I had to look for them. Even
within Europe, there are large differences between countries: notably, UK and Switzerland
pay much higher salaries than other countries. When companies asked me for my opinion
on salary, I’d always tell them that 100k EUR/year was a good number to start negotiations
with. Even before I started interviewing, I knew that this was realistic lower bar, considering
what I knew from my research on the web, my prior internship and talks with friends and
colleagues; There were definitely companies in the UK or Switzerland who would be
willing to pay that much, though the number is fairly ambitious for other regions in Europe.
Still, I figured that starting high was better than awkwardly skirting around the “I don’t want
to give you a number” issue.

Most of the initial offers where were around ~80k - 120k EUR / year. These were total
yearly compensation before taxes, so these offers includes base salary, expected bonus
amount as well as any stock options or extra pension contributions. I floated the highest of
these offers to all recruiters. Overall, I felt that US-based companies (i.e., the ones who’s
center of operation is in the US) were pretty much unfazed by the number I gave and were
willing to negotiate, while most of the European-based companies told me that they
wouldn’t be able to compete with that offer. By the way: no European company ended up
offering more than 100k EUR throughout the whole process. As a next step, I decided on
which offers I thought were really worth following up on. Some companies made a bad
impression during the interview phase, and others were merely a “last resort” option,
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which I wouldn’t need anymore. I thanked them for their time and told them I wasn’t
interested any more. I was left a very small group of offers that I was very excited about: I
would’ve been willing to take any one of these offers right on the spot! This left me in a
very strong negotiating position: I could ask each company to make me a better offer than
the current highest bidder, without being too careful about scaring anyone off. Even if
someone would retract their offer (or was unwilling to meet my demands), I still had other
great offers left. Things ran themselves: everyone outbid the others, driving my total yearly
compensation into areas I’d never have dreamed off. It was a very surreal feeling.

I did maybe 2 rounds of back-and-forth between all the companies. I had the impression
that the recruiters were getting desperate at that point: inviting me & my SO to all-
expenses-paid weekend-trips to their city, sending me surprise gift baskets in the mail,
handing me exploding offers, etc. I felt it was time to call it quits before they all lost their
patience. It’s worth pointing out that while the companies did offer better relocation
packages and sign-on bonuses, they were inflexible in offering additional non-monetary
benefits. For example, no company was able to add more vacation days to their original
offers (which was mostly dictated by regional standards, and varied from 25 to 45 payed
workdays off per year). In the end, by leveraging competing offers this way, the final offer
of the company I eventually signed with was double what their initial offer was. My yearly
total compensation ended up in the 160-240k EUR range (not including sign-on or
relocation bonuses).

A final word about recruiters

I’ve never seen a group of people relying on carrot and stick as relentlessly as recruiters.
They’ll tell you “this offers is the best we can do” (only to update it once they’re outbid),
emphasize that “they will make an exception for you because you’re such a great
candidate” (while offering things that you already knew they’d offer to everyone), they’ll
pull strict deadlines out of thin air (only to be completely open to postponing them 5
minutes later), they’ll tell you that they won’t renegotiate (only to renegotiate as soon as
you bring them a higher competing offer), they’ll tell you for 2 months that they’re
interviewing other candidates for the same position (but never pull the plug on the
negotiation). It felt like the recruiters were always trying to determine if I was truly serious
about picking another offer over theirs, or whether I was just using them to renegotiate with
another company. I guess all of this is to be expected, and my best advice is to always be
polite, patient, and persistent. In my limited experience, as long as you have multiple offers
(and are willing to drop any one of them unless you get what you ask for), you hold all the
power. So negotiate hard.

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Written on April 8, 2019

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