Uber Intern Data Scientist Interview Experience — Rejected in Both Full-Time and Intern Loops

I got rejected for both their full-time and intern positions — the intern process was rejected after the second (final) round, and the full-time process was rejected after the first round. I don't know what the interviewers were looking for; I felt like I answered every question, and communication went smoothly enough.

For the full-time role, the first round jumped straight into a case study after a brief self-intro: they gave me a prompt about whether a drop-off location was in a high-risk neighborhood, and we discussed how to design an experiment around this, what the impact would be, and how to run the experiment if more city samples were available.

For the intern role, the first round was 45 minutes. I wrote a simple coding problem on HackerRank — there was a bit of miscommunication at first where I didn't understand the question, but once I understood what the interviewer meant, I quickly solved the follow-up second and third parts that built on the first question. It wasn't LeetCode-style, just a basic probability calculation problem. The case question was about why ETA matters and what methods to use to address issues with it — this case had come up on the forum before.

The second round was supposed to be 60 minutes according to the recruiter, covering a research/background deep dive plus a case. Instead, the interviewer (from a different team) opened with a 15-minute behavioral round that caught me off guard — the deep dive ended up being entirely about how I handled the behavioral questions (which might be why I didn't pass, since I was forced to improvise some answers on the spot). The case was about promoting incentives to drivers a week in advance to get them to accept rides at specific times and locations — what effect these incentives had, why an A/B test couldn't be used, what the problem was with switchback testing here, and how to handle the variance of the synthetic control estimate, among other things. At the end I asked him a few questions about the role, and he said he wasn't sure about any of them since he wasn't on that team. Three hours later I got the rejection email.

I'd prepared for a long time for this, and I didn't take the other interviews I had in between very seriously. I covered almost everything that came up in the interviews, and I still didn't get an offer. It's a bit discouraging.