ML engineer interview preparation, round by round

ML engineer interviews add ML theory, ML coding and ML system design to the usual DSA round. Many companies now ask about LLMs too.

31 resources · 23 free · plus 23 for every role · Links checked 15 October 2026 · How we pick

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Three resources, in this order. Everything below is for going deeper on one round.

  1. AIMLInterviews (formerly Machine-Learning-Interviews)

    GitHub repo · Free

    An ML engineer interview has more rounds than an SDE one. Use this guide to plan your prep one round at a time.

  2. Deep-ML

    Practice site · Free tier

    Practise the ML coding round here: write models and the maths behind them from scratch in Python, checked by tests.

  3. Stanford CS329S: Machine Learning Systems Design

    Course · Free

    Free lecture notes for the ML system design round. Read them before you decide whether you need a paid book.

ML theory and statistics 15 resources

Statistics, probability, A/B tests, ML algorithms and how to judge a model

  • AIMLInterviews (formerly Machine-Learning-Interviews)

    GitHub repo · alirezadir/AIMLInterviews

    A big-tech ML interview guide arranged by round: coding, ML coding, ML breadth including GenAI and agents, ML system design and behavioral, from the author's own loops.

    Best for planning FAANG-style ML engineer or applied scientist prep one round at a time

    • Free
    • Intermediate
    • 9.9k stars
    • Updated Oct 2026

    Also in ML system design, LLMs and GenAI, Coding and DSA

  • Deep-ML

    Practice site · deep-ml.com

    A LeetCode-style judge where you implement ML maths and models in Python, from linear algebra and optimisers to attention and a small GPT, against test cases.

    Best for the ML coding round, where you write algorithms from scratch in NumPy or PyTorch

    • Free tier
    • All levels
  • Data Science Interviews (Alexey Grigorev)

    GitHub repo · alexeygrigorev/data-science-interviews

    Community-written answers to common data science theory and technical questions, from linear models, trees and metrics to SQL and Python, plus probability problems.

    Best for quick revision of theory and SQL basics before a data science phone screen

    • Free
    • Beginner
    • 10k stars
    • Updated Sep 2026
  • An Introduction to Statistical Learning (ISLR / ISLP)

    Book · statlearning.com

    The standard introductory text on regression, classification, resampling, tree methods and unsupervised learning, with R and Python editions free from the authors.

    Best for the classical-ML fundamentals that data science interviews keep probing

    • Free
    • Beginner
  • The Illustrated Transformer (Jay Alammar)

    Blog · jalammar.github.io

    A diagram-heavy walkthrough of self-attention, multi-head attention, positional encoding and the encoder-decoder flow, for explaining transformers clearly.

    Best for preparing a clean whiteboard explanation of transformers and attention

    • Free
    • Beginner

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

  • Introduction to Machine Learning Interviews (Chip Huyen)

    Book · huyenchip.com

    A free online book that explains ML roles, hiring loops and offers, then lists 200+ maths, CS and ML questions by difficulty, about a tenth with written answers.

    Best for a first read for any ML or data science candidate who wants to know what each round tests

    • Free
    • All levels
    • 4.8k stars

    Also in Resume, companies and offers

  • TorchCode

    GitHub repo · duoan/TorchCode

    Forty-one auto-graded notebook problems where you write PyTorch pieces such as softmax, LayerNorm, multi-head attention and GPT-2 blocks from scratch.

    Best for practising the PyTorch implementation questions asked by AI labs and LLM teams

    • Free
    • Intermediate
    • 4.7k stars
    • Updated Jul 2026

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

  • Machine Learning Q and AI (Sebastian Raschka)

    Book · sebastianraschka.com

    Thirty short chapters, each built around one question on deep learning, vision, NLP and LLMs, deployment or evaluation, that work as practice for 'explain X' rounds.

    Best for mid-level ML and AI candidates who want depth on conceptual follow-up questions

    • Free
    • Intermediate

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

  • Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch): code repo (Sebastian Raschka)

    GitHub repo · rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch

    Step-by-step PyTorch notebooks that build, pretrain and fine-tune a GPT-style model, plus bonus material on newer architectures, with the matching book sold separately.

    Best for explaining and coding attention, pretraining and fine-tuning in depth

    • Free tier
    • Intermediate
    • 107k stars
    • Updated Oct 2026

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

  • Deep Learning Interviews (Kashani & Ivry)

    Book · arxiv.org

    An open-access book of hundreds of solved problems on the maths under deep learning, including information theory, calculus, Bayesian statistics, ensembles and CNNs.

    Best for research-leaning or senior ML roles where interviewers go deep on the maths

    • Free
    • Advanced
  • Lil'Log (Lilian Weng)

    Blog · lilianweng.github.io

    Long, heavily referenced deep dives on LLM agents, prompting, hallucination, RLHF and reward hacking, diffusion models and scaling laws.

    Best for senior or research-leaning AI roles that probe the theory behind LLMs

    • Free
    • Advanced

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

  • Krish Naik (YouTube)

    YouTube channel · youtube.com

    An Indian educator's channel with data science and ML interview-question playlists, recorded mock interviews, end-to-end projects and GenAI tutorials in English and Hindi.

    Best for Indian freshers and career switchers moving into data science, ML or GenAI

    • Free
    • Beginner
    • From India

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

  • StatQuest with Josh Starmer

    YouTube channel · youtube.com

    Short, step-by-step video explanations of statistics, classic ML algorithms and neural networks, built for filling gaps before a theory round.

    Best for revisiting a concept you can't yet explain cleanly, such as p-values or gradient boosting

    • Free
    • Beginner
  • Harvard Stat 110: Probability (Blitzstein & Hwang)

    Course · stat110.hsites.harvard.edu

    Harvard's probability course with recorded lectures, topic-wise practice problems with full solutions, and a free online edition of the Blitzstein-Hwang textbook.

    Best for the probability puzzles and distribution questions in data science and ML screens

    • Free
    • Intermediate
  • Neural Networks: Zero to Hero (Andrej Karpathy)

    Video · karpathy.ai

    Eight long video lectures that build backprop, character-level language models, a GPT and its tokenizer in code, starting from an empty file.

    Best for explaining and coding transformers and backprop from first principles

    • Free
    • Intermediate

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

Back to rounds

ML system design 6 resources

Designing ML systems end to end: data, training, serving and monitoring

  • Stanford CS329S: Machine Learning Systems Design

    Course · stanford-cs329s.github.io

    Stanford's 2022 ML systems design course, with every lecture's notes and slides public, covering data engineering, features, deployment, monitoring and distribution shift.

    Best for a free, structured base for ML system design before (or instead of) the paid book

    • Free
    • Intermediate
  • Evidently AI ML & LLM System Design Case Studies

    Website · evidentlyai.com

    An open index of about 800 company write-ups on how real teams built recommenders, fraud and search systems and LLM, RAG and agent products, filterable by industry.

    Best for collecting real design patterns to cite in ML and GenAI system design rounds

    • Free
    • Intermediate

    Also in LLMs and GenAI

  • Designing Machine Learning Systems (Chip Huyen)

    Book · chiphuyen/dmls-book

    The best-known book on production ML; the linked companion repo has free chapter summaries, an ML refresher and MLOps tool notes, while the book itself is paid.

    Best for mid and senior ML engineers preparing for open-ended ML system design rounds

    • Free tier
    • Intermediate
    • 5.4k stars
  • Machine Learning System Design Interview (Aminian & Xu, ByteByteGo)

    Book · bytebytego.com

    Ten worked ML design problems, including visual search, harmful-content detection, video recommendation, ad click prediction and people-you-may-know, on one framework.

    Best for rehearsing the standard recommendation, ranking and search design questions

    • Paid
    • Intermediate
  • MLOps Zoomcamp (DataTalks.Club)

    Course · DataTalksClub/mlops-zoomcamp

    A free cohort-based course on experiment tracking, orchestration, model deployment and monitoring, ending in a project you can walk interviewers through.

    Best for data scientists moving into ML engineering who need hands-on MLOps experience

    • Free
    • Beginner
    • 15k stars
  • Made With ML (Goku Mohandas)

    Course · madewithml.com

    A free course that takes one ML application through data prep, training, tuning, testing, serving, CI/CD and monitoring, with production-style code.

    Best for talking about MLOps practice and production trade-offs with real substance

    • Free
    • Intermediate
    • 50k stars
Back to rounds

LLMs and GenAI 2 resources

How LLMs work, plus RAG, agents, evaluation and building on model APIs

  • LLM Course (Maxime Labonne)

    GitHub repo · mlabonne/llm-course

    A roadmap split into fundamentals, LLM scientist and LLM engineer tracks, pairing curated reading with Colab notebooks on fine-tuning, quantisation, RAG and deployment.

    Best for filling gaps across the LLM stack before AI engineer interviews

    • Free
    • Intermediate
    • 84k stars
    • Updated Feb 2026
  • Hugging Face LLM Course

    Course · huggingface.co

    A free hands-on course on transformers, tokenisers, datasets, fine-tuning and newer LLM techniques, using the Hugging Face libraries interviewers expect you to know.

    Best for practical transformer and fine-tuning experience to talk about in interviews

    • Free
    • Beginner
    • 4.3k stars
Back to rounds

Coding and DSA 7 resources

Solving problems with data structures and algorithms, and explaining your approach

  • Amazon - How We Hire (role-specific interview prep)

    Official guide · amazon.jobs

    Amazon's hiring hub, explaining each stage from application to the final loop, with role-specific prep pages for SDE, front-end, BI engineer and scientist roles.

    Best for finding out what Amazon tests for your role and level, and how its loop works

    • Free
    • All levels

    Also in Resume, companies and offers

  • Grind 75

    Website · techinterviewhandbook.org

    A study-plan generator that turns a ranked list of high-frequency LeetCode problems into a week-by-week schedule sized to the hours you have.

    Best for candidates with a fixed number of weeks who want the highest-value problem list

    • Free
    • Intermediate
    • 143k stars
  • Canva - "Yes, you can use AI in our interviews"

    Official guide · canva.dev

    A Canva engineering post on why it now expects backend, frontend and ML candidates to use AI coding tools in interviews, and what interviewers assess instead.

    Best for understanding AI-assisted coding rounds and how to show good judgement with an AI tool

    • Free
    • Intermediate

    Also in Resume, companies and offers

  • NeetCode Roadmap (NeetCode 150)

    Website · neetcode.io

    A visual topic map of 150 core LeetCode problems, each linked to a free video walkthrough on the NeetCode YouTube channel.

    Best for learning problem patterns topic by topic, with a video solution for every problem

    • Free tier
    • Intermediate
  • Aced Practice (formerly Exponent; Pramp moved here)

    Practice site · aced.io

    Free peer mock interviews where you pair with another candidate and take turns as interviewer, in DSA, system design, behavioral, SQL, data science, ML and frontend.

    Best for regular, cheap live practice and a feel for the interviewer's side of the table

    • Free tier
    • All levels
  • LeetCode

    Practice site · leetcode.com

    The default site for interview-style coding practice: thousands of problems, free study plans such as Top Interview 150 and SQL 50, and weekly contests.

    Best for daily practice and timed contests (Premium mainly adds company-tagged lists)

    • Free tier
    • All levels
  • interviewing.io - Mock interview replays

    Practice site · interviewing.io

    A free library of recorded, anonymised mock interviews run by big-tech engineers, filterable by company, round and level, with paid live mocks available.

    Best for watching real interviewer feedback on coding, design and behavioral rounds before your own mocks

    • Free tier
    • Intermediate
Back to rounds

Resume, companies and offers 1 resource

Getting shortlisted, researching companies, and comparing and negotiating offers

  • interviewing.io - Senior engineer's guide to FAANG interviews

    Website · interviewing.io

    A free long-read built from talks with FAANG interviewers that compares how Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google and Microsoft run their loops and team matching.

    Best for experienced engineers planning a FAANG or big-tech job search end to end

    • Free
    • Intermediate
Back to rounds

Same for every role

Behavioral rounds, resumes, pay and company guides do not change with the job. These 23 live on the interview resources hub.

From the team that keeps this list

Helpwing is a desktop app for interviews where AI help is allowed: it hears the question and drafts an answer from your resume. It is not for online assessments or tests.

See how Helpwing works

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Open Helpwing on your Mac in 3 steps. The beta is not Apple-notarized yet, so macOS flags it after a browser download. The file is fine; step 1 clears the flag.

Prefer to watch? Every step on a real Mac, from download to sign-in. 1:25
  1. When the download finishes, open Terminal (⌘ Space, type Terminal) and run:
    xattr -cr ~/Downloads/Helpwing-arm64.dmg
  2. Open the disk image and drag Helpwing to Applications.
  3. Open Helpwing from Applications and sign in with Google. When macOS asks, allow Screen & System Audio Recording, then reopen Helpwing once.

Helpwing has no Dock icon: a small dark window opens at the top of your screen, and ⌘ B shows or hides it. Still blocked? System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Do not turn off macOS security.

Problem? Download again · Intel Mac instead · Full troubleshooting

Installing on Windows

One warning is expected. The beta installer is not signed yet, so the first time you run it SmartScreen says “Windows protected your PC.”

Prefer to watch? Every step on a real PC, including the SmartScreen screen. 1:13
  1. Open Helpwing-Windows.exe from your Downloads folder.
  2. If you see “Windows protected your PC,” click More info, then Run anyway.
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