Ivy ML Research Intern Interview Experience

Hi all 👋🏻

I am back with another interview experience. This time it’s Ivy. I am joining Ivy as an ML Research intern in March 2023 for a 12-week long internship.

Selection Status : ✅

Offer Accepted : ✅

Interview Experience : ✅

My Profile while applying

• Final Year student pursuing BTech. in CSE from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology.
• Internship Experience with 6 different companies(Amazon Summer Intern, Experience with a global team at Civo, Swiggy — decacorn startup, ShareChat — unicorn startup, Koo App — India’s Twitter, HoVAR Labs)
• Women Engineering Fellow at Google Cohort 2
• Founder of Peer Programming Hub
• MLH Top 50 Class 2021.
• Problem Solver

How I found Ivy ?

It wasn’t easy at all because of the ongoing recession to find companies that were hiring anyone 🥲

Besides I had few preferences -

• I wanted to explore some new field than what I had already worked with, because this was going to be my last internship during graduation.
• I wanted a remote internship, with flexible working hours so that I vould manage it with my University.

My friend had applied for Ivy few months back and she told me about the company back then and it’s initiative. I was impressed with it, but was already interning at Civo. So, when my internship at Civo ended, she advised me to try Ivy. That is when I approached the creator of Ivy on LinkedIn directly and he shared the link to apply for the position(it was the regular careers page of Ivy, no referral or recommendation was applied)

Selection Process

There were 4 stages of the selection process and it was well organized process. I received a mail about all the stages the very day of applying.

• Apply on careers page
• Paid open source coding assessment
• Ivy Roadmap video answers
• Video Interview

Application process was very simple, like an other job application. Hence, I would just discuss the remaining 3 stages.

Paid open source coding assessment

After the application process, I received a mail with the details regarding the coding assessment. It wasn’t any DSA related assessment, it was a simple assessment where I had to contribute to Ivy Codebase by raising a relevant PR. Once the PR gets approved, I had to share it on the link that was shared in the mail. I raised 3 PRs to be on a safer side and all of them got merged.

Best part about Ivy is, you don’t do anything for free. Every contribution made is paid 💰 and I got paid even for my PRs.

Ivy Roadmap video answers

This stage was different and I was very new to it. In order to clear this stage, one needs to have complete knowledge about Ivy and its mission and I believe every company should have one such stage in their selection process to ensure that the candidates have researched properly about the company before applying.

This stage had 10 questions, all about Ivy(nothing related to DSA, or even ML, it was pure Ivy). I don’t remember exactly, but there were 4–5 sections in which the questions were distributed. Each section had some questions and I had to record myself while answering them. It was live recording, pre-recorded videos weren’t allowed. But, we could take breaks in between different answers. You’ll understand it better once you yourself try it. It was simple, very easy to understand, besides the team and their discord community is super helpful. So, shoot them(us) a message, whenever you need help.

Final Interview

After 2–3 days, I received a link to schedule an interview 🥳. The mail clearly highlighted what the interview was going to be about and what I should be preparing for.

Duration of the interview was 60 minutes. Again, no DSA, no coding was asked. There were different parts in the interview, all about ML frameworks and Ivy codebase. So, I would advise you to apply for the company only when you really like what company is doing and ML interests you. Besides, the roles does require Python knowledge, so consider it as a basic requirement.

As always, I won’t discuss exact questions, but if you have cleared the 1st and 2nd stages, this stage would not be a trouble for you. Interview will all be about Ivy and ML frameworks.

Perks

• Remote work culture
• Flexible Working Hours
• Community Support and Learnings
• Opportunity to grow holistically, we decide how we want to contribute to the team, we have the leadership of our own roles, we define our own roles and responsibilities.
• Competitive pay 💰, the company has a global pay policy, so doesn’t matter if I am a US resident or an Indian, we get the pay, our work deserves.

My Experience and feedback

Wonderful 🤩
Very well organized, a very supportive team, everything was on point. I found the process very relevant.

Hoping for the best experience ahead both in terms of learnings as well as team work 👩‍💻