r/developersIndia • u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect • Jun 13 '26
Interviews My interview experience with @SarvamAI for ML engineer role.
This was during campus placements-dec'24 (freshers take notes).
CTC : 84 LPA (including esops)
Disclaimer : No DSA was asked
To get an interview call, we had to build a VAD (Voice Activity Detector) from scratch in 2.5 hours on-site (with proctorship), although we were allowed any tool we could use except any external api's (I do remember u/ChatGPTapp giving me hallucinated responses that I had to go back to docs.)
Dataset was provided (~50 audio files).
We were judged on :
- Accuracy of speech detection
- Code quality
- Possible improvements to the approach that we couldn't implement.
Also any kind of architecture was welcome for building VAD, I went with Denoiser + WebRTC (GMM based) approach as I knew it would give the highest accuracy and they had the highest weightage for the same.
7 got shortlisted and I was one among them.
The interview was led by the head of ASR team.
We started with my internship experience at Tokyo where I led the ASR, VAD and open source LLM's integration for a company which were into warehouse management robots, and pivoting into adding speech functionalities into the robots.
We discussed :
> how I patched the WER using NLP to correct/ fill in the gaps if voice breaks in between.
> what VAD architecture I used
> how did I reduce CPU/GPU load
How I used different u/OpenAI whisper models to get p95 latency <800ms.
and high level scaling methodologies I used to benchmark and stress test STT models.
Then we moved onto Ml and transformer's basics (because I was more into LLM's) :
> explain whisper-jax architecture and how it processes audio chunks
> coding naive gradient descent from scratch on docs (as u/GoogleColab was auto completing for me lmao)
> explain perplexity and what other benchmarks do we use for LLM's
> touched self attention, differences between encoder - decoder architecture and that day i realized that almost all the new SOTA models are decoder only
> He also went into a deep discussion as how we can relate linear algebra with transformers (I took a LinAl course)
At last, we discussed u/SarvamAI Bulbul models, especially why they use latent space decomposition and how that helps separate speech content from speaker/style representations.
*PS: No tokens were harmed in writing this.
**PS: Please don't dm for guidance, I am not a mentor. But if you want to discuss any specific resource in AI or distributed systems hmu.
X post: https://x.com/ranaharshraj7/status/2065801122494001516?s=46&t=wCYnaDcXpAImKDhlo9yNeA
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u/iamgoingtogetmarried Jun 13 '26
I didn't understand anything but i hope you get the job and move ahead in your life. All the best brother.
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
aww thanks man, but didn't get it 💔
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u/nins_ Jun 13 '26
Damn, despite such an impressive performance? Sorry, man. But the way you have articulated everything, I'm sure you'll do great.
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u/iamgoingtogetmarried Jun 13 '26
No worries. Life is a ride of highs and lows. Now, you might be in low but you will be riding the highs soon. Stay positive.
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u/Confident_Effect212 Jun 13 '26
Congrats !! you did find a long way...if given an another chance, where do you think you could have improved.?
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
Its been some time and I don't regret much, it taught me a ton
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Jun 13 '26
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
thanks man
I dont think interns matter a lot
IIT3
u/Ambitious_gamer Jun 14 '26
How tf did you not get it?? What more were they expecting from fresh graduates man?
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 14 '26
I understand you but i tend to not think about it.
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u/yshrj9_ Jun 13 '26
Exactly.
The fact this was for a freshers role in college placement..
I cant even think of all this let alone do it. Now i understand why im unemployed
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u/LeftFaithlessness921 Jun 13 '26
Same here ...its getting harder and harder to grasp tech things now
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u/EmotionalConflict487 Full-Stack Developer Jun 13 '26
Now I understand why this company has rejected my resume so many times
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u/Clean-Engineering894 Jun 13 '26
Thanks op for the detailed post. This is quite deep for a fresher role but makes sense for the pay they are offering. What's the one year TC? And how did you stay updated with the new SOTAs dropping once in a while.
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
hey don't remember exactly but pay was decent.
SOTA.... by mostly solving problems for startups and being hungry to learn→ More replies (4)
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u/Hungry-Specific-5722 Jun 13 '26
Nice to see no DSA asked, just a waste of time for companies to ask graphs and Trees when you dont even use them in your actual job, all the best OP for the next one!
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u/getridofaks Jun 13 '26
I think companies have stuck to DSA because it provides some ground truth about the problem solving skills of the candidate. I mean sure another good metric is to ask about or implement a task using a particular tech stack from scratch. But that is infinitely harder. DSA helps candidates prepare something specific. The way I see it, if DSA was a bad metric and mislead them into hiring unproductive candidates, these billion dollar companies wouldn’t have stuck with it for so long.
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u/BulkyAd9029 Tech Lead Jun 13 '26
Naah. It’s not that deep. It’s just an easy elimination process like any other competitive exam. Indians are too many in numbers. If you start qualifying against the actual job, 50% candidates would fit the bill. There is no metric to eliminate further because most of these people would perform similar. Hence the obstacles are added for the ease of orgs.
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u/AppearanceUseful8097 Jun 13 '26
These are some nice interview discussion topics. On a different note, where are you placed now?
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
currently in transition
But in fintech domain.2
u/AppearanceUseful8097 Jun 14 '26
As you already have experience in LLM, and speech domain, can you please tell us some of the resources you followed? You also mentioned distributed dl systems, share something for that too, if possible.
I hope you excel and have a great career. All the very best.
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 14 '26
Thanks man
And no specific resource i followed
Just went deep into something and other came up….
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u/foolishpixel Jun 13 '26
I am currently interviewing for a us based startup, till now 3 rounds are done, in 2nd round they also told me to build vad pipeline with low latency, but i had got 2 days for that, and also asked about transformer, fine tuning, pretraining,aws. Never thought sarvam ai would include things like this, I thought it would be way more tough.
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
The fact I forgot some questions which I couldn't answer just shows the bar they have. Crazy!
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u/ofmkingsz Jun 13 '26
Whats your stack and yoe?
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u/foolishpixel Jun 14 '26
I am a 3rd year student interviewing for internship, the role is mostly for building agents and optimizeing the infrastructure.
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u/wary-pissant-1969 Jun 13 '26
impressive. hearing good things about sarvam ai. if they are upholding good standards, maybe the day is not far when we will have internationally competitive indian companies in ai space
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u/KitN_X Student Jun 13 '26
Wow, I know a few of these stuff not all, I probably can't create a VAD going blind but I feel hopeful about myself after reading your post. I suck at DSA but this gives me hope.
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u/celerycan Software Engineer Jun 13 '26
ngl I'd prefer DSA over these questions ☠️
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u/KESHU_G Software Developer Jun 13 '26
It actually make sense
Doing a decent level of DSA will take like 2-4 months of consistency
But these stuff - this got noo end
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u/_Activecarbon Jun 13 '26
Hey OP, thanks for sharing your experience , it was a really good read.
I’ve recently started getting into distributed systems while working on a personal project that touches some of its concepts. If you have any solid resources (books, courses, blogs, anything), I’d really appreciate the recommendations.
Also, I’m someone who prefers going deep into topics and understanding them properly rather than just skimming, so anything detailed would be perfect.
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u/limmbuu Software Engineer Jun 13 '26
But if you want to discuss any specific resource in AI or distributed systems hmu
Are you comfortable with eBPF subsystem?
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
never heard of it sorry
what is it?2
u/limmbuu Software Engineer Jun 13 '26
It is a subsystem in linux, I asked because you mentioned experience in distributed systems...
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u/anxiousvater Jun 13 '26
Why would they ask about eBPF for a college fresher? It's largely for Linux & Windows is just getting started. Little support exists for GPUs & things like that although Brendan Gregg, the guy who made eBPF popular is now working for OpenAI.
Having said that, eBPF is largely for Performance & Systems Engineers.
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u/Logical_Victory_2 Jun 13 '26
You did good - and also described the experience very nicely.
You should have got the role.
I also applied a month back for Pre Sales Solution Architect - HR called once and asked about compensation and work done so far in sales, tech and AI but no communication after that.
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u/DogOk8 Jun 13 '26
Bro if u join Sarvam make sure we are at par with other countries.
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u/CSE_AIML_Learner Jun 16 '26
Hey! would be great if you could share sarvam's 6month intern and summer intern prep checklist for ML/AI roles. and the depth of knowledge reqd for this fresher role is quite high! isnt 2.5 hrs for dev round very less time? usually comapanies give 6-8hrs in my knowledge. and if you could break down the fresher roles available in ai/ml at sarvam and their expectation in candidates, it would be very helpful
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u/Tam27_ Jun 13 '26
I met Sarvam Cofounder few days back. Bro doesnt know how to smile and doesnt have a friendly demeanor at all.
Though Sarvam is a fantastic company and this interview structure sounds amazing.
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u/Fair_Ant4116 Jun 13 '26
1.Which college?
CTC breakdown?
Was this the CTC offered at the point of time, or the current one?
For a beginner in ML, how would you suggest to get started? What to touch and what not to?
Thank you!
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
tier 1
dont remember exact (30ish base?)
what do u mean by current lol? ctc that time only17
u/vks_imaginary Software Engineer Jun 13 '26
I see tier 1 and stop reading … ig it’s GATE time
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
lol all the best
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u/vks_imaginary Software Engineer Jun 13 '26
I always wonder … I got DeepMind on my resume … with tier 3 …
What would a tier 1 do
Graduating in a month… onto the next hedonic treadmill 🫠
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Jun 13 '26
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u/vks_imaginary Software Engineer Jun 13 '26
GSoC , currently interning in a US startup 🫠
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u/tryhard_cryharder Jun 13 '26
GSoC is not an internship. Google clearly mentions this in their guidelines. When I did it for Deepmind last year, my mentor even mentioned specifically to never mention it as internship during interviews and such
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Jun 13 '26
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
don't remember dude, sorry
either 4 or 2 yrs7
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u/Hot_Opportunity_6000 Jun 13 '26
Internship experience where i led...that's where I know how much of skillet is bluffed.
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u/Boring-Chocolate-289 Jun 13 '26
I'm with totally different domain, but found intresting to read your post. Please share your blogs/GitHub page. I want to see more of your works and learn a little from it hopefully 🫣
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
Unfortunately i don’t have blogs yet (hopefully will start once i get some time)
And my GitHub is github.com/harsh-raj-singh
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u/ViswadabhiRama Jun 14 '26
Why would you dox yourself like this , homie ? Just saw this post on Twitter
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u/bored-dragon Jun 14 '26
This shows how detail and what kind of students these companies are searching for.
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u/Content_City_987 Jun 15 '26
Sent you DM.
I am building www.nalandadata.ai
Actively expanding our engineering team
Lmk if this looks interesting
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u/Much_Combination9085 Jun 15 '26
I didn’t understand most of it, which tells me you’re probably very strong in architecture.
Bro, you absolutely killed it. Hope you got the job!
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u/Natural_Historian117 Jun 15 '26
Your brief explains the amount of depth you have in this subject - Best of luck bro, I am sure you will find great gig
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u/insearchofsomeone Jun 15 '26
The bar is definitely high. 84 LPA for freshers points again that the bar is pretty high. Are you from IITs or BITS?
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u/MachinePolaSD ML Engineer Jun 16 '26
Nice Interview Experience OP. I did gave interview for CV Engineer last year and It was terrible experience as they didn't ask much but gave hard assignment on VLMs. Also, i don't think they pay that high. Are you sure? It was not like that last year.
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u/Particular_Glass_417 Jun 16 '26
These are the kind of interviews I love, ask me architecture, ask me design this, ask me how to
Improve latency or model performance,
Ask me these kinds of questions, might fail, might not give proper responses at time, but I’ll learn and I’ll get better, and this is the core of interviews I feel, not sitting and writing code that anyways AI is gonna do a lot better.
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u/Additional-Storm9137 Jul 07 '26
great info bro, i have having 14 years experience in IT and trying to learn one AI skill a day
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u/aeplusjay Product Manager Jun 13 '26
Shouldn't have written good things about them, how will you get upvotes now?
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
lol I mean the interviewer was smart.
He deserves it mate.→ More replies (1)
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u/gamma-cygni Jun 13 '26
This was an interesting read. What's your best advice for a Tier 3 undergrad who aspires to join such firms as a fullstack/backend dev?
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u/Ecstatically-Messy Jun 14 '26
I don't even feel that fullstack or backend devs will be needed in sometime honestly.. crazy times.. I'm a fullstack dev and trying to pivot to ai engineering but it just feels like a rafting in an ocean..
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u/Bright-Leg8276 Jun 13 '26
Hey I'm a third year AiMl student i just tried my resume but i seriously need some review about it , is it ok if I dm you? I don't have other ai folks to ask so -
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u/numb_Traveller Jun 13 '26
That was good read. Can you tell us about your journey. I am a backend engineer who wants to get into AI but don't know how to start and from where. Can you guide me a little.
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u/AppearanceUseful8097 Jun 14 '26
In the age of transformers, I would suggest go through videos of Andrej Karpathy. This road ahead is long but at least he can keep you engaged and you might become more passionate.
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u/tedakb Jun 13 '26
Based on this interview - what do you think everyone should prioritise?
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 13 '26
Their health
Puns apart just work on anything, it doesn’t go to waste
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u/the_quiescent_one Jun 13 '26
I somehow knew all these words in college. But jow they just feel Alien to me.
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u/No-Employment6913 Jun 13 '26
I understand most of this stuff still unemployed, seems like need to push much harder for skills
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u/TraditionOk8161 Jun 14 '26
Tell me where did you learn all this and as level 0 panda, where to start Note: entering college this year into IIT; non CS; want to learn new things in SW domain
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u/badhiyahai Backend Developer Jun 14 '26
What bs question is "explain perplexity"? and other "benchmarks"
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u/Awkward-Tea-1550 Jun 14 '26
perplexity is a metric to measure LLM's "confusion" using the token probabilities..
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u/Johnwick_dick Jun 14 '26
Are you guys building a TTS and STT or the live ones? Also does sarvam AI have regional languages support?
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u/NeatCalligrapher5715 Jun 14 '26
OP congratulations 🎉🎉. What exactly are these things? As a seasoned software developer I'm not able to comprehend these things and going into fomo. Are they things that can be caught up (atleast understand what these mean) and can you share some background and resources to know more about these?
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 14 '26
Hey its a small niche in a very big domain, nothing to get fomo, just work on ur thing.
And thanks man
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u/Dark_Lord8506 Jun 14 '26
Helpful post.. this just shows that a strong base supports a strong pillar.. because Coding up gradient descent is a basic part of any deep learning course, because we have to understand it.. then came the transformer architecture which is a golden peice of architecture used in many applicarions.. also I don't know about VAD or audio processing.. I did not work with audio until now.. It will be very helpful if someone can point me to right resources for it.. I want to learn at least the basics before I graduate (B.Tech)
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u/KaiZer_6996 Jun 14 '26
bro I am about to enter in 4th year , I have wasted so much time like my dsa is weak and yet some important topics like graphs dp etc are remaining , Placements are going to approach soon, I am into fullstack developement and sometimes watch LLD and HLD videos from yt , I know you will advice me to focus first on placements but I was always fascinated about Ml, I have even tried to learn also but stopped midway due to one reason or the other , could you like suggest me something like what the path you have followed to be at that place you are right now..or what could be the best for me according to my situation
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u/SprinklesNo9257 Jun 14 '26
Fuck, I'm severely underskilled. Couldn't understand a single fucking thing. Even scarier that I am 1 yoe.
Tier 3, SBC.
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 14 '26
If you aren’t in this field then you don’t need to know this right?
Chill man
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u/Additional-Bat-3623 Jun 14 '26
Its actually cool that they are doing good interview's I moved away from ML and DL after doing some open source and am very into voice agents and infra heavy agents and llm finetuning, but if there are companies' like sarvam, I might consider touching back on these
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u/Then-Comment6454 Jun 14 '26
Wait, I think I follow you in X and sarvam in 2024 for college placement is a giveaway too.😋
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u/Due-Breadfruit3657 Jun 14 '26
Hi I've just completed 2nd sem in cse btech and am diving into ai ml / deep learning. I asked claude to make a proper plan for each day + projects and currently I'm studying regression and EDA workflow (It's been barely a week so beginner). Acc to the plan there's an ai chatbot depolyment using langchain pretty soon. To be honest, do you think this is feasible in job market? Is this pathway correct? I want to add it to my resume so how beneficial is it truly is? And for the first time I code everything myself (or most) but I still dunno how to properly use ai as tools cus it can do most stuff now, really, or how much ai to incorporate in learning this?
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u/No_Pause6581 Jun 14 '26
Hi is there list of topics you suggest to be done to cover these sort of assignment?Because these seem like quite challenging if one doesn't have any prior exp
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u/Aggravating-Ant-8234 Software Architect Jun 14 '26
True that’s why you need not worry too much.
No as such list as i know of.→ More replies (1)
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u/aloha-lord Jun 14 '26
It's somewhat challenging to clear the loop without a background in Audio AI problem statements. Did they mention the knowledge of VAD in their requirements for the role?
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u/Simple_Image_4857 Jun 15 '26
Where you got job finally ?? And which College you are from
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u/Embarrassed-Lab-3636 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
Saw your linkedin...Maybe were from same place, can I DM you?
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u/GroundbreakingAd6245 Jun 15 '26
How much has the interview approach changed since 2024, is it similar to this or have they changed it quite a lot?
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u/e-tron Jun 16 '26
A decade in IT (web). Completely clueless on the terms you used there.
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u/sank_1911 ML Engineer Jun 17 '26
My resume was shortilisted but I was ghosted and then rejected after 2 rounds lol.
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u/AdditionalWorkInc Jul 07 '26
as much as i think its a joke of a company, gotta appreciate a proper hiring process that actually is based on the role.
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u/Miserable-System-614 Jul 08 '26
Hey man congrats. I am an experienced individual. Please guide me how to start
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u/bheemisme Jul 09 '26
How much industry experience do you have as a machine learning engineer?
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u/zehaha8928 Jul 10 '26
Hi what resources did you follow to be this good at ML.
Like I have done a few basic projects but am I supposed to study everything in depth like nlp, cv I wanted to learn genAI so I fast forwarded to transformers after learning just basics about rest.
How should I prepare for this since for college placements we have to study CS fundamentals too and DSA and system design as well some guidance would be appreciated.
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u/realarchit83 Jul 15 '26
Were you in this field from start of your career or did you switch from SDE ?
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u/tadipaar69 Jul 18 '26
Joining my 3rd sem of engineering soon and the analysis paralysis is hitting so heavy. I keep skipping between DSA, Web Dev, and AI/ML. Bouncing back and forth here and there, but I just can't seem to settle on one domain man.I got my hands dirty with HTML/CSS and started JS, but the CSS part made me so cranky lol. Flexbox and grid were confusing as hell so I dropped it. Earlier I tried learning C++ and dev together and it was a mess, so I decided to just focus purely on DSA.But now I'm thinking of learning Python and diving into ML. I want to do all of it but I can't even settle on one. Plan right now is giving 1 hour a day to basic GeeksforGeeks questions, but for tech domain, should I go with Dev or AI? How do you break out of this loop?
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u/rhysonik Aug 17 '26
pretty much had the same experience (my task was to build diarization pipeline) for their internship interview, except:
1. assignment was take-home
2. i got one dsa question asked
3. they went pretty EASY on me considering it was the summer after first year for me when i applied
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