Application: Applied through company website in late Nov’17. Received an email from the recruiter in early Jan’18
Interview 0: Phone screening interview by the recruiter
• Basic background questions such as ‘visa status’, ‘start date if hired’, ‘tell us about experience’, ‘tell us about BAPM’, ‘how did you find about Company’ , ‘tools used’ , ‘examples of functionalities/tools used in Python, Tableau’, ‘level of expertise on a scale of 10 with Python, Hive, Big Data framework, Tableau‘
• Discussed interview logistics
Interview 1: Phone interview with Staff Data Analyst aka Data Scientist for 1 hour
• 5 – 10 minutes on my resume: STAR approach expected although not explicitly stated
• SQL questions: Given a dataset schema with different scenarios to test my knowledge on
o Handling missing values & outliers – data quality
o Handling time series
o Using self-joins
o Using window functions
o Data transformation from wide to long and vice-versa
• Statistics:
o Probability distributions
o Hypothesis testing (very critical for this role): went beyond univariate testing of means
o Dimensionality reduction techniques
o Classification model evaluation metrics
o Fixing high bias and high variance scenarios
• Python:
o arrays vs loops - evaluating computation
o Text/String matching – regex, levenshtein, cosine etc.
o Building a Logistic regression model without libraries/modules
o Pandas dataframes vs dictionaries
Interview 2: Phone interview with Hiring Manager for 30 mins
• Resume walkthrough
• Thorough evaluation of project management skills – planning a month/week/day, prioritizing tasks, identifying problems for business, leading a team, collaboration with engineering and business
• Behavioral questions: failure example, why company, success metrics for personal growth, success metrics for team growth
Interview 3: four hours of onsite interview
3.1 Interview with the whole team including hiring manager:
Prepare and present a few slides for each section below
• About You – (~5 minutes) Prepare 5 mins about you – Personal and professional
• Portfolio of your work – (~15 minutes) Showcase 1-2 of your proudest professional achievements and why; what the objective(s) was of the initiative, what specific role(s) you played, what the outcome(s) of the initiative was, what you learned, and why you selected this achievement(s) to share. To hear about your role and how it would relate to being a candidate at Company, to see anything you can show off that you’re proud to display
• Case – (1 hour): How do we improve the experience of first-time users on one of Company’s products (leaving out product name for confidentiality)
Evaluated on problem formulation & ideas, applying A/B test scenarios, designing A/B test with right statistical considerations, knowledge on recommender systems, knowledge on ML problem design
3.2 Interview with Analysts, Data Scientists:
Whiteboarding session on Python, R, SQL, Data viz, critical thinking on data exploration, Causal Inference
Comment: A longer version of Interview 1
3.3 Interview with team manager:
Common behavioral questions focused on Company’s core values. Provided with links to go through before the interview
3.4 Interview with hiring manager:
Common behavioral questions focused on Company’s core values. Opportunity for the candidate to ask questions
