I interviewed with a team under USDS for a data engineer role. The questions were really weak, so I'm mainly going to focus on the whole process instead.
Right now I've just finished one HR round plus three Zoom call rounds.
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 — never heard anything about the rest.
Then, almost a month later, I suddenly got an email from a recruiter saying he wanted to talk about the USDS DE role. I hadn't prepared anything and just hopped on a call with him. Turns out we still went over my resume a bit, and I did a little BQ. Then he walked me through the process and that was it. The process was: OA first, and if you pass that, three interviews get scheduled, and if you pass those, you get to talk with the head of the bigger team.
On the call he told me I'd need to do an OA first before I could move forward. I waited a day and never got the OA link. Then the recruiter sent an email saying I could just skip it and go straight to scheduling the three interviews.
He asked for my availability and I sent it over. Then out of nowhere a second recruiter popped up and said, "I've scheduled you for times A, B, and C" — completely outside the windows I'd given! I wrote back asking to change the times and got ignored. Fine, I'll just interview whenever you picked. I worked through a bunch of hassle to get myself ready for round 1, and then, an hour and a half before the interview, the second recruiter suddenly emailed to push all three interviews back a week, because their schedule didn't work...
Then round 1, which was with the hiring manager — I actually wrote up round 1 separately right after it happened. It was BQ plus a little bit of SQL. Actually it wasn't really SQL, either — it was a Hive query that was already written, and you had to debug it.
Next was round 2. What I didn't expect: I thought this round would be a mix of chatting and problem-solving, but it turned out to be pure chatting — BQ plus me asking questions back at them.
Then round 3. This one came with both a Zoom link and a HackerRank link. I figured, okay, this round we'll finally actually write something? Turned out it was data modeling. They gave a scenario and a handful of metrics they wanted, and you had to design tables based on those metrics — what tables you'd design, and what columns would be in each one. I just talked through it off the top of my head, and then I was about to start writing SQL against the tables I'd sketched out, and they said, no need, the interview's already over... I was just sitting there like, what? We haven't even written any code? The interviewer said, nope, don't need to.
Alright then, so that's the process so far. As for whether there's a next step, I'm not sure yet — figured I'd write it up while it's still fresh.
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