Apple Maps Analytics Engineer Interview Experience — Two Technical Rounds, Rejected Despite Glowing Feedback

Apple Maps - Metrics Engineering team

I'd honestly never heard of this role before. I looked up a lot of information about it, and it feels kind of like a Data Engineer role with an Analytics focus — designing data pipelines for various Apple Maps features, and designing metrics to measure the app's performance.

A recruiter reached out to me, and I went into the interview with a "why not, let's see" attitude. I ended up failing the interview, but this was honestly the best interview experience I've had so far! Both the hiring manager and the technical interviewer were incredibly nice and gave me a ton of positive feedback.

I also did some digging — Apple Maps isn't a revenue generator, but it's part of the Apple ecosystem, integrated into Weather, Photos, Siri, Location Services, and other features. The team has a lot of long-tenured people, turnover is very low, and the culture is pretty great.

There were two technical rounds total: the first was 45 minutes of Python, the second was 45 minutes of SQL and database design.

The first round's Python was mostly OOP. I didn't copy down the exact problem, but it went roughly like this:

You're given a parent class and a child class.

class Parent:
    def __init__(self, l):
        self.l = l
        self.lf = set(str(s) for s in self.l)
        self.ldf = {}
        for item in self.l:
            s = str(item)
            if s not in self.ldf:
                self.ldf[s] = 1
            else:
                self.ldf[s] += 1

class Child(Parent):
    def most_frequent_key(self):
        # find the highest count manually (you're not allowed to use max())
        # you need to write this part yourself
        ...
        return output_list

# Example
queries = ['park', 'Park', 'McDonalds', 'apple', 'Apple Park', 'park', 'Park']
# first you write: x = Child(queries)
# then: print("most frequent:", x.most_frequent_key())

Wishing everyone smooth interviews and lots of offers!