Building a restaurant‑recommendation feature with Nearby Friends signals
Company: Meta
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Scenario: Leveraging real‑time location, Meta wants to suggest nearby eateries. Outline data requirements, forecast behavioural change, validate model effectiveness, measure success, and mitigate privacy concerns.
Question 1: How would you use Nearby Friends location to build a new feature? (Hint: live coordinates, activity patterns, social graph)
Question 2: Why create restaurant recommendations and how might behaviour change? (Hint: offline conversion, social sharing)
Question 3: What data sets are required? (Hint: merchant POI, user preference profile, time‑of‑day context)
Question 4: How would you validate model effectiveness? (Hint: A/B test, click‑to‑visit rate)
Question 5: Which key metrics post‑launch? (Hint: recommendation uptake, purchase conversion)
Question 6: What negative impacts could arise? (Hint: privacy concerns, merchant bias, battery drain)
Question 7: How does restaurant recommendation differ from ‘People You May Know’? (Hint: real‑time context, content diversity)
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's competencies in real-time location-based recommendation systems, experimentation and metrics design, data integration, and considerations around privacy, fairness, and operational trade-offs.