This isn't a super fresh write-up, but while I was prepping I noticed there weren't many Data Scientist interview experience posts here, so I'm sharing mine.
First was the HR phone screen — we talked a bit about projects I'd worked on before and they asked about my SQL and Python experience. I passed and got scheduled for the first round.
The first round had two sessions: they said it would be one product case and one technical.
The first session was a case study, and honestly it felt pretty easy. They asked something like: if there are two stores near a school gate, how would you compare their profits, and so on. Lots of follow-ups, but I answered all of them and felt like it went well.
The second session was a total wipeout. The table was about a product's user info. It opened with a simple SQL question — just needed a WHERE clause, solved it instantly.
Before even giving me the second question, the interviewer said "this one's going to be pretty challenging, pretty tricky" — and right away I knew something was off. I thought, I'm done for.
Long story short, I had to calculate CRR, but with a ton of extra conditions piled on. I originally wanted to do it with a CTE + JOIN, but it got too tangled and I couldn't finish it.
The interviewer eventually hinted that I should use LAG, but by then time was basically up, so he told me I didn't need to keep going. Then he mentioned it would probably take 4-5 CTEs to actually solve it...
At that point I was already falling apart mentally. Didn't expect he'd throw in another product case on top of that — a really simple AB testing question about changing the color of a button in an app.
But he kept saying there wasn't enough time and wanted me to pick a metric fast. I gave one, and he must have thought it was too general because he seemed to want something more specific.
In the end we never really got into the details, wrapped it up with a couple of sentences and that was that.
A day later I got a clean, quick rejection and went straight into the freeze period.
Looking back on it, I probably just wasn't prepared enough. I had actually prepped for CRR beforehand, but he kept stacking on so many extra conditions that it completely threw off my rhythm.
Good luck to everyone out there!
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