Reading interview reports here helped me a lot, so I'm giving back with my own timeline and report.
Got an HR call at the end of February, and scheduled an HM call for a week later. The hiring manager was great — she mostly shared her own experience and what the team does, then went through my resume in detail.
After the HM call in early March, I got a Data Challenge. Very classic problem, overall not hard — just pull in a pipeline from your own work or coursework and walk through it.
Two days later I got feedback and scheduled Power Day for early April.
Technical: Matches the recent reports here. 1. Pretty standard environment setup — you can look things up if you don't know something. 2. Look at some code, explain what it does, then talk about the benefits of that code's design. 3. Point out what's wrong with another piece of code, mainly readability and cleanliness issues — if you have good coding habits, the uncomfortable parts jump out at you immediately. 4. Run pytest, explain what's wrong, then write a test function.
Role Play: The classic flight-delay case, nothing extra to add — you can look at other reports for it. My interviewer did it a bit differently: instead of giving me 15 minutes to prepare and 20 minutes to present, he had me go through it with him page by page. Same classic questions, from EDA to model explanation.
Culture fit: Talked with the same hiring manager again, still a great experience — got a deeper look at the team's work, then a few classic behavioral questions. I don't remember the exact wording, but roughly things like "please share an experience of using advanced techniques to solve a problem," collaborating with others, helping others. Then the classic ethics question.
Case: 500k users with customer segmentation into 3 groups. Also a classic case question, just simple calculations, with a few graphing questions at the end. I have a habit of working out a formula and then trying to draw the graph precisely, but the interviewer felt that wasn't really necessary — what they wanted was more business sense, just judging directly whether the first/second derivative is positive or negative and sketching a rough shape. No need to actually calculate it.
Got the offer 3 days later.
Overall a great experience, and you don't need to stress about LeetCode — as long as you genuinely have this kind of experience and these habits from real work or school, you should be fine.
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