I interviewed for a data engineer role on one of the teams under USDS. The questions were pretty weak, so I'll focus mostly on the process instead.
Right now I've just finished one HR round plus three Zoom call interviews.
First, I had a friend at TikTok (not on the USDS team) refer me for a bunch of positions, but I only got one rejection back — no response on any of the rest.
Then, almost a month later, I suddenly got an email from a recruiter wanting to talk about the USDS DE role. I hadn't prepared anything and just hopped on the call with him. Turns out we still went over my resume a bit and did a little BQ. Then he walked me through the process going forward and that was it. The process was: OA first, then if you pass that, three interviews get scheduled, and if you pass those, you get to talk to the head of the bigger team.
He told me on the call that I'd need to do an OA first before moving forward. I waited a day and never got the OA link, then the recruiter emailed saying I could skip it and go straight to scheduling the three interviews.
He asked for my availability, I gave it. Then a second recruiter suddenly showed up and said, "I've booked you for times A, B, and C" — completely outside the window I'd given! I emailed back asking to change the times and got ignored. Fine, I'll just interview whenever you scheduled it. I scraped together everything I could and got ready for round 1 — then, an hour and a half before the interview, the second recruiter suddenly emailed and pushed all three interviews back a week, because their own schedule didn't work…
Round 1 was with the hiring manager, and I actually came here and wrote up the experience right after I finished it. It was BQ plus a little bit of SQL. Actually it wasn't really SQL — it was an already-written Hive query that you had to debug.
Round 2 was next. What I didn't expect was that I thought this round would be chat plus a coding problem, but it turned out to be pure chat: BQ plus me asking questions back.
Then round 3, which had both a Zoom link and a HackerRank link. I thought, finally, this is the round where I'll actually get to write code? Turns out this round was data modeling. They gave a scenario and a few metrics they wanted, then had me design tables based on those metrics — what tables I'd design, and what columns would be in each one. I just started talking through it off the top of my head, and then got ready to start writing SQL against those tables, but they said no need, the interview was already over… I was just like, what? We haven't even written any code yet? The interviewer said, no need.
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