Data Scientist Machine Learning Interview Questions

Practice 434 real Machine Learning interview questions for Data Scientist roles. From companies including Meta, Amazon, Google, Capital One, TikTok.

434 Questions 85 Companies08.03.2026
Showing 20 results
Role
Bytedance logo
Bytedance
Medium
Data Scientist

Choose Ranking Functions, Customer Value Metrics, and Predictive Models

Choose Ranking Functions, Customer Value Metrics, and Predictive Models A global e-commerce team asks three connected fundamentals: distinguish SQL ra...

Machine Learning
2
0
33 people solved
Aug 3, 2026
Walmart Labs logo
Walmart Labs
Medium
Data ScientistSenior+

Explain Transformer Components and Tree-Ensemble Trade-offs

Explain Transformer Components and Tree-Ensemble Trade-offs A technical discussion covers two foundations: how encoder and decoder components work in ...

Machine Learning
2
0
21 people solved
Aug 1, 2026
Microsoft logo
Microsoft
Medium
Data ScientistSenior+ AI

Build and Defend a Baseline Model from a CSV

You receive a CSV during a live interview and are asked to build a useful predictive model. You may use code-completion or agent tools, but you must d...

Machine Learning
7
0
68 people solved
Jun 29, 2026
Capital One logo
Capital One
Medium
Data ScientistSenior+ Locked

Compare Logistic Regression and Random Forest in Python

Compare logistic regression and random forest for a binary classification problem implemented in Python. Cover preprocessing pipelines, regularization...

Machine Learning
9
0
70 people solved
May 31, 2026
Tower logo
Tower
Hard
Data Scientist

Explain Why Constant Neural-Network Initialization Fails

During neural-network training, what happens if every weight is initialized to 0? What happens if every weight is initialized to the same nonzero cons...

Machine Learning
0
0
7 people solved
Jul 26, 2026
Point72 logo
Point72
Medium
Data Scientist Locked

Explain How L1 and L2 Regularization Change Linear-Model Coefficients

Review a machine learning interview question comparing ordinary least squares with L1 and L2 regularization. The prompt focuses on coefficient behavio...

Machine Learning
5
0
68 people solved
Jun 12, 2026
Tower logo
Tower
Hard
Data Scientist

Predict Five-Minute Returns from Order-Book Data

You have time-stamped order-book observations containing buy and sell information, instrument, price, and quantity. Design a model and evaluation proc...

Machine Learning
0
0
5 people solved
Jul 26, 2026
Two Sigma logo
Two Sigma
Medium
Data Scientist

Analyze Temperatures and Update Regression

You are given historical daily temperature data for New York City and several nearby towns. Each row contains a date, the NYC temperature, and the tem...

Machine Learning
19
0
217 people solved
Apr 21, 2026
OpenAI logo
OpenAI
Hard
Data Scientist

Debug and fix a PyTorch Transformer training loop

Minimal Causal LM Debugging and Optimization You are given a tiny causal decoder-only language model implemented in PyTorch. It appears to "train" but...

Machine Learning
312
0
2119 people solved
Oct 13, 2025
Two Sigma logo
Two Sigma
Hard
Data Scientist

Predict bike demand and avoid overfitting

You are given historical data for a city bike-sharing system. Available fields include station_id, hourly timestamp, number of bike pickups and return...

Machine Learning
15
1
155 people solved
Mar 13, 2026
Jane Street logo
Jane Street
Medium
Data Scientist

Design a Real-vs-Fake DNA Classifier

Question You are given DNA sequences over the alphabet {A, C, G, T}, where sequence lengths may vary. You have: - a small labeled dataset containing b...

Machine Learning
17
0
299 people solved
Jan 27, 2026
Two Sigma logo
Two Sigma
Hard
Data ScientistIntern Locked

How would you forecast bike demand?

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in time-series forecasting, feature engineering, model selection, and evaluation for short-horizon de...

Machine Learning
15
1
130 people solved
Apr 2, 2026
Amazon logo
Amazon
Medium
Data Scientist Locked

Predicting the Next Elevator Call Location

This machine learning question tests the ability to design a predictive model for spatio-temporal demand forecasting, covering problem framing, featur...

Machine Learning
5
1
66 people solved
Jun 8, 2026
Gsa logo
Gsa
Hard
Data Scientist

Predict Stock Returns from Sentiment and Market Data

You have observations containing timestamp, stock identifier or index membership, sentiment score, relevance score, and stock prices. Design a model t...

Machine Learning
0
0
6 people solved
Jun 26, 2026
Citadel logo
Citadel
Medium
Data Scientist

Analyze Correlations and Generate Gaussians

You are interviewing for a quantitative data science role. Answer the following probability and simulation questions: 1. Let \(X\), \(Y\), and \(Z\) b...

Machine Learning
21
0
203 people solved
Feb 21, 2026
Waymo logo
Waymo
Easy
Data Scientist Locked

How predict vehicles’ turn direction at intersection?

This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in time-series intent prediction at intersections, including label definition under ambiguity, t...

Machine Learning
41
0
392 people solved
Jan 17, 2026
LinkedIn logo
LinkedIn
Medium
Data ScientistIntern

Explain Logistic Regression, Backprop, and Adam

Walk through the mathematical foundations that connect logistic regression to modern deep-learning training. The interviewer expects you to write the ...

Machine Learning
158
0
1205 people solved
Apr 5, 2026
Two Sigma logo
Two Sigma
Hard
Data Scientist Locked

Predict Bike Dock Demand

This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in time-series demand forecasting, covering temporal target definition, temporal feature enginee...

Machine Learning
28
1
202 people solved
Mar 18, 2026
J.P. Morgan logo
J.P. Morgan
Medium
Data ScientistSenior+

Explain Core ML Concepts

You are interviewing for a senior AI/ML-oriented Data Scientist role at a financial institution (J.P. Morgan). This is the "ML fundamentals" portion o...

Machine Learning
25
0
181 people solved
Apr 24, 2026
Amazon logo
Amazon
Easy
Data ScientistIntern

Evaluate NLP Classification Models

You are interviewing for a Data Scientist internship at Amazon. The interviewer asks you to walk through how you think about an NLP classification pro...

Machine Learning
21
0
254 people solved
Apr 3, 2026

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