Reuters·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
May 2026
Theory-heavy screen for an applied scientist role at Reuters, even though the listing said software engineer. Four topics back to back, all conceptual, no coding. Felt more like a machine learning exam than a job interview.
- Define overfitting and underfitting in supervised learning, explain how you'd detect overfitting in practice, and walk through at least three or four techniques to reduce it.
- Explain the core idea behind contrastive learning for representation learning, including how positive and negative pairs are constructed and what kinds of downstream tasks benefit from it.
- Describe a common contrastive loss function like InfoNCE or NT-Xent, focusing on the intuition of how it pushes representations apart or pulls them together.
- Describe the transformer architecture at a high level, including self-attention, how it differs from RNNs or CNNs, positional encoding, and the components inside a transformer block.
“Felt confident here.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Reuters, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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