Recently I had 23 interviews and received 4 job offers. Some of them were for "Data Scientist in NLP". The title could be anything from "Data Scientist with focus on GenAI" and "AI Engineer" up to more generic "Machine Learning Engineer", where from the role description it's clear that it's related to NLP. In all cases the job is to build or improve solutions with LLMs. I didn't see much material on how the interview process for such roles looks like in Germany. So maybe sharing my experience will help other people, who are currently looking for a job in this domain.
(photo by Maria Kostyleva)
1. Working in NLP in Germany means working with text in German, so fluent German (C1) is required for most of the roles.
I know, I know, it's kinda obvious, but still when I mention it to someone, they're often surprised.
2. The most typical reason why a company decided to hire another expert in this domain: they have successful PoC or even running service and would like to extend their team to improve it or tackle more use cases.
For a candidate it means, they have a team with experience, who is looking for an experienced team-mate. Technical round is usually with 2-3 interviewers and they will ask all kinds of questions.
3. The most typical questions: embedding methods, transformers (high level understanding), RAG. Evaluation of LLM based services is the main headache for teams, be prepared to talk about this too.
Knowing theory is good, but giving examples from your experience is better.
4. The interview process typically consists of four rounds and lasts between 3 to 7 weeks
Screening call (HR or HM) - Technical round - Use Case - Behavioral
"Use case" can be building a small demo or sketch of the solution and presenting it to the group with tech and non-tech stakeholders.
For NLP roles I didn't have any "Live coding" or any variant of it.
5. Although almost every company is trying to do something with LLMs these days, there are not so many good candidates on the market.
The goodness of the candidate is mostly evaluated based on their practical experience. People with decent pet projects and MLE attitude have many chances. So if you want to break into this field in Germany, now it's the best time.
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