I spent 40 days (2026‑10‑13 – 2026‑09‑03) interviewing with 20 companies across Bengaluru and Gurgaon while job‑hunting in India.
I applied to 2 companies via referrals, 11 inbound applications, and 7 outbound outreach efforts.
The process yielded 6 rejections, 6 ghosted processes, and I declined 7 opportunities.
I accepted 1 offer – a Software Engineer role at Zomato announced on 2026‑10‑12.
- Project depth matters: interviewers probe architecture rationale, trade‑offs, performance, and potential changes.
- AI engineering interviews span backend APIs, system design, ML/DL fundamentals, retrieval, rerankers, model architectures, training/evaluation, production trade‑offs, problem‑solving, and behavioural questions.
- Assignments are common, ranging from implementing GPT‑2 from scratch to building computer‑vision pipelines.