Scale AI

A recruiter call, a timed HackerRank coding screen and a hiring manager chat, then a virtual onsite of coding, applied engineering, a signature debugging round, AI-data system design and a values round; candidates are told up front the culture is high intensity.

• 

  Shuffle, deal and sort a four-player card handCodingYou are building the core of a four-player card game. Model a standard 52-card deck and implement the deal. Types to define - Suit: CLUBS, DIAMONDS, HEARTS, SPADES, in this order…

  Last asked Aug 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  CSV upload endpoint that classifies rows with an LLMCodingA practical round: build a service endpoint that takes an uploaded CSV, sends each row to a language model to classify it, and returns the results as JSON. Write the prompt and…

  Last asked Jul 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Design a pipeline around embedding and classification servicesML designYou have two services, one that embeds items and one that classifies them. Design the API and the pipeline that uses them to process incoming data: how requests flow, batching…

  Last asked Jul 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Design a distributed job schedulerSystem designDesign a service that runs millions of scheduled and on-demand jobs (cron-like and one-off) reliably across a fleet of workers.

  Last asked Jul 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Project deep dive: present a project you ledBehavioralPresent a project you led in about 20 minutes: context, your role, the architecture, three hard trade-offs, metrics, cost and return, and what you would change. Then take 25…

  Last asked Jul 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Behavioral round on company valuesBehavioralA behavioral round anchored on the company's published values: bring experiences covering conflict, feedback, mentorship, leading work and technical trade-offs. Reported on…

  Last asked Jul 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Task scheduler that pops the earliest deadline once its subtasks are doneCodingImplement a class with addtasks(tasks) and consumetask(). Each task has an id, a deadline and a list of subtasks. 1. consumetask returns the task with the earliest deadline, or a…

  Last asked May 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Update a grid of firing neuronsCodingA grid holds neurons that are either firing or not. In each step every neuron's next state depends on how many of its neighbours are firing, in the style of the Game of Life…

  Last asked Feb 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  ML fundamentals deep dive for ML rolesML designAfter a short walk through your resume, expect fast questions on machine learning basics, usually centred on your own area (language models, vision, recommendations). For each…

  Last asked Feb 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Implement multi-head attention and LLM samplingCodingImplement multi-head self-attention from scratch, then the sampling step of a language model: given logits, pick the next token with temperature, top-k and top-p (nucleus)…

  Last asked Feb 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Debug a project-assignment codebaseCodingYou get a small codebase spread over several files that assigns projects (for example to students or courses). Some tests fail. Read your way around it under time pressure, find…

  Last asked Jan 2026Were you asked this too?
• 

  Party hours and quiet gaps by neighborhood and cityCodingA community events app records every party in two separate lists that share a partyId: - partyWindows: rows of partyId, start, end. start and end are hours as strings, and a party…

  Last asked Dec 2025Were you asked this too?
• 

  Angle between clock handsCodingGiven a time in hours and minutes, return the smaller angle between the hour hand and the minute hand.

  Last asked Dec 2025Were you asked this too?
• 

  Design a ticket booking systemSystem designSell seats for concerts and games where demand spikes the moment sales open: hold seats briefly, never sell one twice, and stay up under the rush.

  Last asked Dec 2025Were you asked this too?
• 

  Load balancer with worker states, a priority queue and autoscalingCodingIn a time-boxed backend round, write a small load balancer in Python. Workers move through states (for example starting, idle, busy, draining), requests go to workers through a…

  Last asked Dec 2025Were you asked this too?
• 

  Lowest common ancestor in an N-ary treeCodingGiven the root of an N-ary tree and two of its nodes, return their lowest common ancestor. Use one depth-first pass in which each subtree reports whether it contains each of the…

  Last asked Dec 2025Were you asked this too?
• 

  React hook for API data and UI changes in a starter appCodingIn a starter React app with API and UI code already written: write a hook that fetches data from the API and converts it to the shape the UI needs, then change the UI as asked…

  Possibly retiredWere you asked this too?
• 

  Write a text parser and fix the bugs in an ML projectCodingIn a one-hour round on an existing ML project: first write a parser that turns raw text data into the format the project needs, then find and fix three bugs elsewhere in a fairly…

  Possibly retiredWere you asked this too?
• 

  Implement a universal adversarial attack on GPT-2 from a paperML designA long take-home notebook: read the paper on universal, transferable adversarial attacks on aligned language models (the greedy coordinate gradient attack) and implement its…

  Possibly retiredWere you asked this too?
• 

  Count stable server segmentsCodingA row of n machines has integer capacities capacity0..n-1. A contiguous segment l, r is stable when all of these hold: 1. It contains at least 3 machines (r - l = 2). 2. The two…

  Were you asked this too?
• 

  Cross the most walls on a number line with limited energyCodingWalls stand at distinct non-zero integer points on an infinite number line. Wall k is at positionsk and costs costsk = 0 energy to cross. You start at 0 with energy units. Each…

  Were you asked this too?
• 

  Distinct OR values of increasing subsequencesCodingGiven an integer array arr, define the goodness of a sequence as the bitwise OR of all its elements. The goodness of the empty sequence is 0. A subsequence keeps elements in their…

  Were you asked this too?
• 

  Evaluate a new LLM before launchML designYou have a new model checkpoint. Design the evaluation process that decides whether it ships.

  Were you asked this too?
• 

  Minimum distance between two nodes in an N-ary treeCodingYou are given the root of an N-ary tree. Every node has an integer val, unique within the tree, and a list children of its direct children. There are no parent pointers…

  Were you asked this too?
• 

  Poker hand checker with jokersCodingWrite isvalidhand(hand: liststr) - bool for a five-card poker game. Each card is a string "<rank of <suit". The rank is 2 to 10, J, Q, K or A. The suit is hearts, diamonds, clubs…

  Were you asked this too?