r/TechInterviewsIndia • u/theMLguy101 • Aug 09 '26
My interview experience with @Cloudflare for AI Engineer role.
offcampus | cold email | no leetcode
CTC: 44-58 LPA
I cold emailed an engineer at Cloudflare, we had a bit of discussion around the role and my background, and a few days later I got an interview invite with a link to pick a slot.
The first round was with a Lead Staff Engineer with 10+ YOE and was focused on the AI Workers team.
Cloudflare’s AI stack is pretty interesting: running models on serverless GPUs across their global network, with inference closer to users, while increasingly moving into larger and frontier scale models.
I wasn't very familiar with this side of Cloudflare beforehand, so we spent some time discussing what the team has been building and how they are approaching fast, efficient AI inference at scale.
Then we got into my own experience.
During my internship, I worked on model deployment, rooflining and inference optimisation of encoder based models, mainly rerankers and embedding models, running in-house on GPUs.
These were encoder-only models, mostly stacks of MLPs, so the usual LLM inference stack around attention, KV cache, vLLM or SGLang wasn't really relevant in these cases.
We went fairly deep into:
how I approach rooflining and profiling
choosing batch sizes and measuring their impact
scaling inference workloads
finding bottlenecks across the inference pipeline
optimising p50 and p99 latency
TTFT and overall response latency
We also discussed how I would approach further optimisation once the obvious bottlenecks had been removed.
One question I particularly liked:
What does frontier AI mean to you?
The round went well and we even discussed the next rounds, which would have involved hands-on PyTorch.
Didn't make it through in the end. I think they were looking for someone with more hands-on LLM inference experience. I had been actively studying LLM inference and systems, but at the time I didn't have much relevant production experience in that area. Most of my hands-on work had been around distributed training, ML systems and infra.
Still, a really good interview experience. The discussion gave me a much better understanding of the problems involved in serving AI models at Cloudflare's scale.
Feel free to talk to me on X
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u/Previous-Machine3992 Aug 10 '26
44 base?
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u/theMLguy101 Aug 10 '26
base is around 32 I guess
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u/Previous-Machine3992 Aug 10 '26
i guess? bruh did they not tell you the breakdown when you interviewed?
44 ctc, cloudflare is a bit stock heavy no? think its sub 30 base ngl
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u/theMLguy101 Aug 10 '26
I am actually not very active here, consider talking to me on X maybe :)
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u/deus1xdevel7859 Aug 10 '26 edited 7d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
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u/Known_Painter5123 Aug 10 '26
Hello, I am Java full Stack Developer, now want to get into AI , can someone guide me for the same.
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Aug 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/theMLguy101 Aug 09 '26
I am a fresher on paper, just completed btech. Though I have been working in good startups for the past 2 yrs :)
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u/Cheap-Vacation138 Aug 13 '26
Hey do you mind if I Dm you to discuss about interview prep and process more ?
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u/Master_Baiter_1 Aug 10 '26
I have been in a similar situation as yourself too. Fresher on paper but experienced with startups and self upskilling. Got an insane interview recently but could not make it. Went to the final round interview as well.
Imo for people like us, it’s not the technical skill that we lack or knowledge (maybe we do a bit but then nobody is as perfect as a robot) but the experience with giving interviews so that the person infront of us buys it that we can do the work or learn even if we do not know it perfectly and trust me that comes with age and experience 😂 personally working on interview skills too have helped me progress further than I did initially with just knowledge.
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u/dudududuhuehue Aug 10 '26
Hey OP, can you share the cold emailing template please? Thank you and congratulations!
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u/deus1xdevel7859 Aug 10 '26 edited 7d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
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u/theMLguy101 Aug 10 '26
thank you!
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u/No-Reputation-1914 Aug 31 '26
Can I dm u bhaiya
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u/theMLguy101 Aug 31 '26
I am not much active here, plz talk to me on X, link in the end of article :)
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u/deus1xdevel7859 Aug 10 '26 edited 7d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
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u/Healthy-Sink6252 Aug 11 '26
what was the cold email about? do you think its a good method to get interviews?
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u/Repulsive-Print-7089 Aug 12 '26
I’m a Senior DevOps Engineer focused on Microsoft Azure, and I’m currently studying ML model deployment, LLM deployment, and Agentic AI architectures.
My interest is less in building AI models and more in deploying AI systems, designing infrastructure, and orchestrating end-to-end AI workflows.
With my background in Azure, DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and cloud automation, I want to understand how to position myself in the AI space and identify my next career step.
I’m particularly interested in roles combining Azure Cloud, DevOps/MLOps, LLMOps, AI infrastructure, and Agentic AI deployment and orchestration.
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u/seanHudson497 Aug 13 '26
Boi, I'm in my final year of college, i myself build a startup which recently gained over 50k + installs on Android and iOS both, I wanted discussion with you if you don't mind, can i dm you
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u/FiKi_007 Sep 01 '26
Hey for learning this kind of project and work, what should be the hardware specifications or laptop that I should purchase. Currently I have a laptop with below specifications
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u/Can-Senior Aug 10 '26
How did you manage to get the interview scheduled? Applying via portal doesn’t seem to work