I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Faculty.ai (London, England) in Dec 2025
Interview
The interview had 2 rounds. The first round was coding. This was Python coding of simple NLP code problem. Think converting str to bag of words then.
2) Business case study: very simple standard DS problem and discussion around that
extra word
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a previous time you used a machine learning model
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Faculty.ai (London, England) in Feb 2026
Interview
1. Screening call with HR. The role was advertised as remote, on call they told me I would need to relocate to London as it’s actually 4 days a week in person and that even if I did move to London I would have to commute out to the South West.
2. Take home test Codility - basic questions about lists and dictionaries and felt like a waste of time
3. “Technical interview” - a 30 min live coding task that wasn’t relevant to the role, another 30 min of “theory” but the level of detail wanted wasn’t realistically ever a conversation I would have with a coworker or a stakeholder.
My interviewers were switched out at the last minute so I had no clue who I was speaking to, they didn’t introduce themselves either or ask me any questions about myself or my experience. They made snide comments about if my WiFi would be good enough when I said I was taking the call from a family members house (I had explained I was there due to a bereavement). The same interviewer kept “correcting” me mid way through a line of python on any typo/indents and wouldn’t let me check for myself then held this against me. The scenario wasn’t something you would ever do in a data science role and the python commands for working with lists and pandas are different but my brain kept defaulting to the pandas command (I knew it would probably be wrong I just wanted to check) and he was still correcting me.
The theory section wanted a ridiculous level of detail which unless you’re a fresh grad or studied for hours and hours I don’t see why you would retain that info. Or ever realistically needed, it felt like they were looking for a researcher not a DS.
I asked about the team structure and said I was keen to work with more senior colleagues and learn different ways of problem solving and gain broader experience. The interviewer again made a dismissive comment saying that he had done a PhD and had to work on his own for 4 years and so I should suck it up and do the same????
Honestly I am so relieved I don’t have to do another call with them it was the worse interview I’ve gone to and I just wanted to leave the whole time. Really wouldn’t recommend.
Model overfitting issues and fixes.
Hyper parameter tuning
How does xgboost model work
If you went to a stakeholder with a model that was biased gender wise how would you explain it to them — that one was really odd because you had to go into detail about the “social” ramifications rather than just presenting your stakeholder with all the information so they can make an informed decision which is what you would actually do
I interviewed at Faculty.ai (London, England) in Sept 2025
Interview
First was a screening with an in-house recruiter, then technical interview with other data scientists, then commercial interview with seniors (a tech and a commercial lead). First part was straightforward and technical interview was very basic. Final interview is challenging with lots of scenarios, but the interviewers were always nice.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you manage clients who want to increase the scope once the project has started?