Applied online, talked to HR after a couple of weeks. Then they sent me a take-home challenge. 6 hrs time limit. The challenge was actually fun, about how to optimize transportation using ML.
They then flew me to SF for a round of interviews. Didn't enjoy this much though. Felt more like an exam than a a job interview and often questions looked like they were designed to make the interviewer feel smart, not really to check my potential.
Anyway, didn't get the job and probably I would have not fit the culture anyway. Just as an advice to them if they are reading this: the data challenge was great, but 1:1 interviews were poor. Maybe introduce a data challenge also in the onsite. Some tech companies do it and it is probably more useful than some random puzzle.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A take-home challenge about transportation, some puzzles (expected value of breaking a bar, birthday stuff), coding some ML algos.
I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Lyft
Interview
The first round is good, but the second round they asked me something about conditional probability, and ask you to solve a real problem within some time. It made me feel nervous, with two people staring at you
I interviewed with a recruiter last fall. Since I was graduating in eight months, she said she'd talk to the hiring manager about whether to send technical interviews now or hold off for different openings in the future, and would get back to me in a few days. She never followed up and didn't respond to my emails. Eventually, I got an automated rejection, the subject line literally read "Update on [insert job title]," they hadn't even bothered to fill in the job title. The whole process felt unprofessional.
