Intuit Data Scientist Interview Experience — TurboTax Take-Home, Growth Team Onsite, and a Slow Recruiter Process

First there was a TurboTax home assignment, then a 45-minute presentation plus Q&A. In this part they ask about the recommendations you make based on the data, whether your assumptions are reasonable, and what other data you could look at. I remember there being a question like that, and I didn't have a good answer at the time.

The task was predicting whether tax filing succeeds or not, and there's a variable called session_count. Since the original data had a lot of missing values and zeros, they first asked how I handled that during modeling. I said I tried two approaches, filling with 0 or with the median, and it didn't make much difference to model performance. Then someone asked: this data isn't available at filing time, so what does the model do then? Since this variable is the most predictive one, and the schema says it's a cumulative session count, I asked what was causing this data to be unavailable, but I didn't get an answer.

There was also a question about session_count — it's negatively correlated with success. The hypothesis I proposed was that some people's tax forms are complicated, they struggle with them for a long time, and that might create friction. Of course you'd need more data to verify that hypothesis. They also asked if I had any counter-arguments.

There was also a smaller case study round — a QuickBooks scorecard with different access points, showing application start-to-complete rate and the final paid rate. You could see the numbers differ across access points, and the funnel changes. The question was to state three insights and then what the recommendation/next step would be. Honestly there were a lot of data points — 15+ access points, each with 7-8 columns of data. Of course you mainly look at the top few, since the rest of the access points have very little traffic, kind of like an 80/20 split.

The HM round was a case study about QuickBooks adding a progress bar to the onboarding flow. Onboarding has four steps: onboard -> send payment -> set up bank account -> file the tax. The question was how I'd assess whether this progress bar helps. Pretty standard question.

Since this is a growth role, and also a new team, they clearly put a lot of weight on that kind of experience. I saw a lot of negative reviews about this place on the forum, and one thing I noticed myself is that things were chaotic starting from the recruiter — scheduling each round took about two weeks on average, emails often went unanswered, they'd send you a week of their own availability, then a week later you'd need to resend your availability for the next week. Also, for the presentation, I remember their requirement was "ace for awesomeness" — my understanding is that you need to show unlimited enthusiasm for the company and spend a huge amount of time on it. I spent about 6-8 hours total, half of it on the slides and about two hours on the model. Looking back, I don't think that was enough time — they wanted you to know the case better than that. So basically, only consider interviewing there if you're willing to put in serious effort into the process.