IBM CIO Interview Experience for Software Developer (Intern+FTE)

ROUND 1: This round was a coding round. The coding was conducted online. The test consisted of 6 questions. 

• 2 questions on arrays (Exor sum of all subarrays, Maximum or sum), 
• 2 from SQL, 
• 1 simple problem, 
• and 1 graph-based problem.

I solved around 3 questions with passing all test cases. That was sufficient to get me through the round.

ROUND 2: My round 2 interview was a Technical + HR interview. There were two HRs questioning me. They first started by reviewing my code from round 1. One of the HRs asked me to optimize my code. I did it. Then he asked me to solve a question that I didn’t solve in round 1. I solved it. After this, they asked me to walk them through my projects. I have done 4 projects and I spoke about all of them. My project interests were in ML and AI. The HR also had the same interests. He then started throwing questions. He questioned me on basic ML and my projects. The questions were like 

1. What is Gradient descent?
2. What is Loss Function?
3. Why Gradient descent is expressed as dy/dx?
4. What is F1 score? What’s the formula for F1 score?
5. Tell me a case when we use the F1 score as a performance metric instead of accuracy.
6. How do you identify if your model is overfitted or under fitted?
7. What are step sizes?
8. What is the local minimum? How do you achieve it?
9. Then a few questions on epochs, batch size, and learning rate from my project.
10. Being an ECE student can you manage to work as a software developer?
11. If I put in an ML and AI project, can you work independently?

These are some of the questions that were asked in the interview. So, you must be strong with your knowledge of your projects. High number of projects will really help you clear this round. Along with these, you must also be knowing CS concepts like OS, Networks, and Data Structures. I was the last candidate to be interviewed. After my interview, I waited for 10 mins and they read out the selected candidates’ names. I got selected. That’s pretty much it. All the best.