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PATRICK HALINA

I'm a Staff ML Engineer at Pinterest focussed on applying AI to shopping. Prior
to this, I led the ML Engineering team at Zynga and worked on the ML Marketing
platform at Amazon in Seattle. I live in Toronto.

 * Home
 * Posts
 * About
 * Publications and Talks
 * ML Eng Interview Guide
 * LinkedIn: patrick-halina
 * Twitter: @PatrickHalina


ML STUDENT CAREER ADVICE

Nov 30, 2021 If you’re currently in university and thinking about working in ML,
it’s never too early to start thinking about your career. Should you get a PhD?
What companies should you work for? What are the important skills to learn? I
gave a talk on career advice to the Data Science club at my alma mata, The
University of Toronto. This article summarizes my highly opinionated advice!
TLDR; The best place to work after school is big tech, but it’s not easy to get
in!
Read More…


CODING INTERVIEW GUIDE

Aug 29, 2021 Advanced degree in computer science? Check. Good marks in school?
Check. Years of professional experience at prestigious tech companies? Check.
Okay, just solve this programming riddle while an interviewer looks over your
shoulder. By the way, the interviewer just added “it’s an easy question” ie. if
you don’t solve it in 10 nanoseconds you’re an idiot. Coding interviews are
pretty hated, but you shouldn’t let them stop you from getting your dream job.
Read More…


ML ENG INTERVIEW GUIDE

Aug 29, 2021 A lot of people ask me for advice about ML Engineering interviews,
since each company does things differently and it really combines a lot of
skills. I went through a round of interviews at big companies on my way to
joining Pinterest as a Staff ML Engineer, so I’m going to put together a few
articles with detailed advice. These guides offer strategic advice on how to
deal with the interview process as well as an overview of important tech and ML
concepts you should know.
Read More…


ML SYSTEMS DESIGN INTERVIEW GUIDE

Jan 17, 2021 One of the trickiest interview rounds for ML practitioners is ML
systems design. If you’re applying to be a Data Scientist, ML Engineer or ML
Manager at a big tech company, you’ll probably face an ML Systems design
question. I recently tackled this question at a few big tech companies on my way
to becoming a Staff ML Engineer at Pinterest. In this article I’m going to talk
about how to approach ML Systems Design interviews, core concepts to know and
I’ll provide links to some of the resources I used.
Read More…


SYSTEMS DESIGN INTERVIEW GUIDE

Jan 1, 2021 This article gives tips and advice for systems design interviews,
which are the hardest questions to prepare for in FAANG style software
engineering interviews. I recently joined Pinterest as a Staff ML Engineer,
which meant interviewing with a bunch of big tech companies for the first time
in 6 years. I did well enough to get some offers so I’d like to share my
approach (without breaching any NDAs and getting sued.
Read More…


SPARK SUMMIT 2020

Jul 14, 2020 My talk from this year’s Spark Summit is online about our
experiences deploying Deep Reinforcement Learning in production. We also talk
about our new open source Deep RL library, RL Bakery. I was looking forward to
going to San Francisco to give the talk live, but of course Covid turned the
summit virtual. It does take a bit of pressure off, prerecording the talk, but
you also lose some of the energy without a live audience.
Read More…


DATA INTENSIVE TEXT PROCESSING WITH MAPREDUCE

Sep 25, 2012 There’s a big learning curve when you jump from studying statistics
in school to programming statistical tools for Amazon scale data. Big Data’s
swiss knife is Map Reduce, so it’s often the case that you have to describe any
data manipulation algorithm in the Map Reduce Paradigm. Since I’m new to Map
Reduce, I’ve been reading up on best practices. One book that I saw recommended
on the web was Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce, by Jimmy Lin and
Chris Dyer.
Read More…


THE THANK YOU ECONOMY - GARY VAYNERCHUK

Jun 6, 2012 Thesis: In The Thank You Economy, Gary Vaynerchuk says that it in
order for companies of any size to grow in the future, they will have to engage
their customers at a personal level. His logic for this is that in the past,
commerce was dominated by small mom and pop shops and interactions with
customers at a personal level was the norm. Then in the 1950′s, people moved out
to the suburbs which led to increased isolation.
Read More…


THE QUEST FOR THE CURE REVIEW

Jan 20, 2012 The Quest for The Cure is a very interesting book that gives an
overview of past and present pharmaceutical breakthroughs. I don’t have much
formal education in chemistry or biology, but I am drawn to medical and
biotechnology breakthroughs. Medical issues touch everyone and in my view this
field has the greatest impact on improving the human condition. That being said,
this is a one of kind book that gives just the right amount of detail on the
past, present and future of drug development.
Read More…


WHAT IS STOCHASTIC CALCULUS

Nov 17, 2011 One of the cool things I’ve learned about in grad school is
stochastic calculus. I’m far from an expert on the subject but I’m going to
share the basic idea of a Stochastic Integral. Quick Review Reimann Integral
Equation The integral everybody learns about in high school and undergrad is a
Reimann Integral, where you’re finding the area under a function by partitioning
the space into a sequence of rectangles.
Read More…


TEST DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT - KENT BECK

Sep 11, 2011 A good saying in software development is that “if it’s not tested
it doesn’t work”. Every programmer agrees it’s a good idea to test your code,
the question is what’s the best methodology to do the testing. One very useful
tool is unit tests, which is code that performs a series of specific tests on a
module to test its functionality. By using a common unit testing framework
across a project, it’s easy to create new tests, run the entire suite of tests
for a project, and check if any tests are failing.
Read More…


CLEAN CODE - ROBER "UNCLE BOB" MARTIN

May 30, 2011 I found this book to be a great refresher on writing clean code. By
clean code, I don’t mean code that has good “style”, such as indentations and
comments. The essence of being a good programmer is splitting a problem into
clean abstractions. This book advocates writing extremely short functions and
classes, each with one specific purpose. While some may argue that increasing
the number of functions or classes also increases the complexity of the program,
Robert Martin simply views this plethora of functions as exposing the true
complexity of the problem.
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CODE COMPLETE 2

May 30, 2011 Code Complete 2 is a really useful book on good programming,
software engineering and management principles. I read this several years ago
and it’s really shaped the way I program. It’s a thick book, but it covers
creating software at a lot of different levels. It starts at a really low level
with coding style issues, like variable naming, spacing, and other low level
details. It progresses to higher level software design issues; abstracting code
into classes and functions, design patterns.
Read More…