Citadel Data Scientist Interview Experience — A Late, Awkward Interviewer and One Linear-Fit Question

Citadel·Data Scientist·Jan 2026
Technical Screeneasy

The technical interview was supposed to be 30 minutes, but the interviewer showed up 5 minutes late. Fine, whatever. Then he introduced himself, and the whole thing was really awkward — he stumbled over his words the entire time, and all he actually said was his name and his job title. Then he just froze there, like maybe he was supposed to say something about the company, but he said nothing at all... Afterward he asked me to introduce myself, so I talked through my education and my work experience. When I finished, he asked, "what do you do." So I had to repeat the work experience I'd just described, plus why I was applying for this DS role. Then he froze again....

Then he opened CoderPad. I figured he was going to test Python, but the interviewer just paused for a while, then wrote y ~ c (a linear fit to a constant), followed by e = sum(abs(y - yhat)), minimize e, and asked me to estimate c — which is just finding the average... And that was it, nothing else happened.

Honestly, the whole thing was really confusing.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Citadel
Role
Data Scientist
Rounds
Technical Screen
Difficulty
easy
Interview date
Jan 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

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