Applied Research Scientist Interview Questions

260 applied research scientist interview questions shared by candidates

Problem: Top K Most Similar Documents You are given: an integer array queryEmb of length D, representing a query embedding a 2D integer array docEmbs of size N x D, representing N document embeddings an integer k All embeddings are already L2-normalized. The cosine similarity between two normalized vectors is equal to their dot product. Return the indices of the k documents with the highest cosine similarity to queryEmb, ordered from most similar to least similar. If k > N, return all document indices sorted by similarity. Function Signature def topKSimilar(queryEmb: np.ndarray, docEmbs: np.ndarray, k: int) -> np.ndarray
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Applied Research Scientist

Interviewed at Microsoft

4
Mar 21, 2026

Problem: Top K Most Similar Documents You are given: an integer array queryEmb of length D, representing a query embedding a 2D integer array docEmbs of size N x D, representing N document embeddings an integer k All embeddings are already L2-normalized. The cosine similarity between two normalized vectors is equal to their dot product. Return the indices of the k documents with the highest cosine similarity to queryEmb, ordered from most similar to least similar. If k > N, return all document indices sorted by similarity. Function Signature def topKSimilar(queryEmb: np.ndarray, docEmbs: np.ndarray, k: int) -> np.ndarray

Can't recall the specific questions and they varied by individual. The worst questions were from someone who grilled me on steps of analyses and actually said "pretend you are walking to your computer. Now tell me how you are going to analyze your data." Others were more innocuous but there was still an element of testing ad nauseum.
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Applied Research Scientist

Interviewed at Apple

4.1
Jun 30, 2021

Can't recall the specific questions and they varied by individual. The worst questions were from someone who grilled me on steps of analyses and actually said "pretend you are walking to your computer. Now tell me how you are going to analyze your data." Others were more innocuous but there was still an element of testing ad nauseum.

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