Internia

Data Scientist Interview Experiences

Palantir

Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA

Summer 2024No Offer

University of Waterloo · Statistics

5th year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 3 past internships

Hard Interview

TechnicalMultiple rounds

Same OA format as FDSE I think but onsite was stats focused, hypothesis testing and model evaluation metrics. Behavioral was embedded into every round, that was different. Coding bar felt pretty high.

Questions Asked

  1. 1.Whats the difference between L1 and L2 regularization? When would you use each?

Microsoft

Data Scientist

Seattle, WA

Winter 2026No Offer

University of Waterloo · Data Science

3rd year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 1 past internship

Average Interview

TechnicalMultiple roundsSlow process

Online assessments took forever verbal numerical then the games then HireVue after and final round two interviews where partner brought up influencing a team and senior manager wanted to know about failure. standard but conversational

Questions Asked

  1. 1.How does k-means clustering work and what are its limitations?

Shopify

Data Scientist

Toronto, ON

Summer 2026Accepted

University of British Columbia · Computer Science

5th year · 3.7+ GPA · 4+ past internships

Hard Interview

TechnicalMultiple roundsVirtual

A/B testing setup and how to handle p hacking and peeking at results came up and I wasn't expecting that at all. First technical round was statistics and probability, questions about distributions and how you'd design an experiment with finite sample size constraints. Second round was a machine learning system design question about building a merchant recommendation engine at Shopify scale. Also a values interview that felt more human than most. Long process overall but the interviewers were smart and treated it like a real technical conversation rather than a gatekeeping exercise

Questions Asked

  1. 1.Given a model with high accuracy but poor recall on the minority class, what would you do?

Meta

Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA

Fall 2023No Offer

University of Waterloo · Data Science

Alumni · 2.9-3.2 GPA · 4+ past internships

Hard Interview

TechnicalSlow process

Prescreen with campus recruitment was chill then assessment day was interesting, they put us in groups to work through business cases and present to a panel with a debrief after each one. Final round was just about work experience and industry knowledge, I think the group exercises are where they actually evaluate you

Questions Asked

  1. 1.What's the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning? Give examples
  2. 2.Explain the curse of dimensionality

Apple

Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA

Fall 2024No Offer

Georgia Tech · Computer Science

4th year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 3 past internships

Average Interview

TechnicalMultiple roundsSlow process

Recruiter screen then technical assessment medium LC then two 45 min interviews with the managers. Process took 6 weeks, felt long but the actual interviews were reasonable

Questions Asked

  1. 1.Why Apple over similar companies?
  2. 2.What is the ROC curve and what does the AUC represent?

Lyft

Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA

Winter 2026No Offer

University of Toronto · Statistics

4th year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 2 past internships

Easy Interview

Slow process

45 min on Teams they went through my resume and wanted to know about a REST API I built and leadership questions too, felt casual but took over a month to hear back

Questions Asked

  1. 1.How do you deal with missing data? What are the trade-offs of different approaches?

Shopify

Data Scientist

Toronto, ON

Winter 2025No Offer

University of Toronto · Computer Science

2nd year · 2.9-3.2 GPA · 0 past internships

Average Interview

TechnicalMultiple roundsBehavioral

Online assessment first with situational judgment and pattern recognition and logical reasoning stuff. If you pass that you get a 1 on 1 interview with 4 behavioral and 2 situational questions. Then the panel, 6-7 behavioral questions in one hour using the CAR format not STAR. A lot of questions one after another in a short window

Questions Asked

  1. 1.What excites you most about the opportunity at Shopify?
  2. 2.What's your approach to feature selection for a high-dimensional dataset?

PepsiCo

Data Science

Summer 2026Accepted

Wilfrid Laurier University · Data Science

3rd year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships

BehavioralVirtualTechnical

Typical behavioral questions and then some technical questions like writing sql query, data cleaning, and then a case study on machine learning techniques. Interviewers were very friendly and accomodating

Uber

Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA

Summer 2025No Offer

UC Berkeley · Statistics

3rd year · 2.5-2.8 GPA · 1 past internship

Average Interview

TechnicalVirtual

Technical phone screen had SQL and a stats question on modeling surge pricing demand. Explained the approach fine but yeah

Questions Asked

  1. 1.What is cross-validation and why does it matter?

Nvidia

Data Scientist

San Jose, CA

Summer 2025No Offer

Northeastern University · Computer Science

2nd year · 2.1-2.4 GPA · 0 past internships

Hard Interview

TechnicalUnexpected Questions

CUDA and GPU memory questions which I was not prepared for as a DS candidate. also Python and ML model selection. Nvidia DS is very different from other companies because of the GPU focus

Questions Asked

  1. 1.How would you detect if a model is suffering from data leakage?
  2. 2.What is transfer learning and when is it preferable to training from scratch?

Equifax

Data Science

Summer 2025No Offer

Wilfrid Laurier University · Data Science

4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships

TechnicalMultiple roundsBehavioralLive codingUnexpected Questions

Multi-stage interview First round was with HR, I was asked standard behavioural questions about myself and my interest in the role. Second round was a technical interview. Had to complete 2 easy/medium array manipulation-type coding questions on the spot and walk through my approach. Next I was asked some theoretical questions relating to statistics and data manipulation (topics included variance, confusion matrix ,etc). The last question was a logic puzzle about pouring water in a cup

Amazon

Data Scientist

Summer 2026No Offer

UCLA · Computer Science

2nd year · 0 past internships

Live codingMultiple rounds

OA had two LC medium questions, plus work simulation questions, then final round was heavy on leadership principles, brought up disagreeing with someone and they push for specific detail on your examples

Wealthsimple

Data Scientist

Toronto, ON

Winter 2026No Offer

University of Toronto · Statistics

4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships

Average Interview

TechnicalMultiple roundsVirtual

They care a lot about how you explain your approach and the tradeoffs you made. Recruiter screen then technical, OOP modelling of financial data, then a project showcase where I presented my best ML project. Good feedback but I didn't make the cut in a competitive cycle

Questions Asked

  1. 1.Tell me about a machine learning model you built end-to-end

IBM

Data Scientist

Toronto, ON

Fall 2025Pending Outcome

Toronto Metropolitan University · Computer Science

1st year · 2.1-2.4 GPA · 0 past internships

Average Interview

TechnicalBehavioralIn-Person

Phone screen with recruiter then another call with ops team, then take home assignment analyzing some operations problem. Haven't done the final round yet but people have been nice and the take home was interesting

Questions Asked

  1. 1.How does a random forest differ from gradient boosting? When is each better?
  2. 2.How do you evaluate a clustering result when you have no ground truth labels?

Johnson & Johnson

Data Scientist

New York, NY

Summer 2026Pending Outcome

Purdue University · Statistics

3rd year · 2.9-3.2 GPA · 1 past internship

Average Interview

Pre-recordedTechnicalBehavioralMultiple rounds

They wanted my research background summarized in 90 seconds for the pre recorded video, plus two other timed questions. Multiple rounds after, behavioral and one technical on regression modeling and handling missing data. Waiting on final round feedback now

Questions Asked

  1. 1.What is PCA and when would you use it?

Databricks

Data Science

Summer 2026Accepted

University of Waterloo · Data Science

4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 3 past internships

TechnicalVirtualLive coding

Live coding with 2 interviewers fizz buzz type question then mostly situational based behaviourals like about leadership etc

EY

Data Science

Montreal, QC

Winter 2025Accepted

Concordia University · Computer Science

4th year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 1 past internship

Average Interview

BehavioralVirtualConversational

The HackerRank OA had three parts, coding then SQL then an API task and I thought I did fine on coding but the SQL was rough

Questions Asked

  1. 1.Whats the difference between a decision tree and a logistic regression model?
  2. 2.How do you communicate model results to a non-technical stakeholder?

DoorDash

Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA

Fall 2025No Offer

UC Berkeley · Statistics

3rd year · 1 past internship

Average Interview

TechnicalCase studyVirtual

Phone screen with someone from data asked about experiment design and SQL. Technical round was a case on measuring delivery ETA accuracy.

Questions Asked

  1. 1.Why DoorDash over similar companies?
  2. 2.Describe a time your model performed well in training but poorly in production

Uber

Data Scientist

San Francisco, CA

Summer 2025No Offer

Purdue University · Computer Science

2nd year · 2.5-2.8 GPA · 0 past internships

Hard Interview

TechnicalCase study

Everything happened so fast, OA 50 MCQs in 35 minutes then same day got called for DSA round with hashset and tree questions. Second DSA next day was harder DP on subsequences, manager got into a guesstimate about daily deliveries in Bangalore then rapid fire about resume claims process was 2 days total.

Questions Asked

  1. 1.Whats the difference between bagging and boosting?
  2. 2.Explain the difference between gradient descent SGD and Adam

Reserve Bank of India

Data Scientist

Summer 2025Accepted

University of Toronto · Statistics

3rd year · 2.9-3.2 GPA · 1 past internship

TechnicalResume Review

Asked about my resume in depth- past projects and how they connected to what I am studying

Accenture

Data Science

London, ON

Fall 2025Accepted

Western University · Data Science

3rd year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 2 past internships

Average Interview

Case studyIn-Person

HR screen was fine then the technical round had JavaScript React and C# questions, weird combo but their stack uses all three, LeetCode easy level questions and some SQL plus OOP concepts, took 3 weeks total which they warned me.

Questions Asked

  1. 1.How would you handle a dataset where 95% of labels belong to one class
  2. 2.Walk me through your process for cleaning and preparing a messy real-world dataset

PepsiCo

Data Science

Winter 2026Accepted

Wilfrid Laurier University · Data Science

4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships

TechnicalResume ReviewVirtual

First half was behavioral then asked some easy technical questions related to unsupervised learning and difference between overfitting/underfitting. They were friendly and one interview only before I got the offer

Google

Data Scientist

Waterloo, ON

Fall 2025No Offer

University of Waterloo · Statistics

4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships

Easy Interview

TechnicalMultiple roundsVirtual

application took forever just to set up the account. Got an email for an interview like 3 months later and by that point I forgot I even applied. Two people on the call asking basic behavioral stuff, tell me about a time you worked on a team, how do you handle deadlines. Also some questions about databases which were easy. It was painfully slow and I already accepted something else by the time they got back to me

Questions Asked

  1. 1.How do you decide which model to use when starting a new problem?
  2. 2.How would you approach building a recommendation system from scratch

Dayforce

Data Scientist

Toronto, ON

Summer 2026Accepted

University of Waterloo · Computer Science

4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships

Easy Interview

TechnicalLive codingVirtual

C# came up briefly even though the role was data science focused, just awareness questions not coding. Technical had OOP questions and then a short problem involving string manipulation in Python. SQL query too

Questions Asked

  1. 1.How would you design an A/B test to evaluate a new feature?
  2. 2.How would you approach a regression problem with highly correlated features

Marble AI

Data Science

Fall 2025Accepted

University of Waterloo · Statistics

3rd year · 2 past internships

EasyVirtualFast processResume ReviewBehavioral

15 mins, really easy, heard it's way harder for FTEs with like 4 rounds but for intern ig they didn't really care all that much

Manulife Financial

Data Science

Summer 2025No Offer

University of Toronto · Computer Information Technology

3rd year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 1 past internship

Multiple roundsTechnicalGhostedFast process

Took 1 week total 2 interviews a couple days apart. Standard process HR round then manager round, technical questions were focused around CI/CD and Github mostly

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