I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Lyft (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
I was initially contacted by a recruiter for this role, and the process went like so:
1. Phone screen with recruiter
2. Technical phone interview - open ended business problem (45 minutes)
3. Homework assignment
4. Another technical phone interview - more open ended business problems (45 minutes)
5. 5 hour on-site interview, all technical questions about stats, algorithms, probability, use cases, etc..
The whole process was pretty quick and smooth. The recruiter did a great job of keeping in touch and letting me know how things were going. Everybody I interviewed with was very nice, smart, and excited about working at Lyft.
There are two main criticisms I have:
1. Homework assignments are getting more commonplace for these roles. This means there's some inherent bias against older applicants or those with families that simply don't have time to spend on it. This certainly shows in the age distribution of the people who work there and will interview you. I refused to do it and was able to move forward without doing it.
2. 100% technical questions. There were zero questions to assess cultural fit or emotional intelligence. Basically, be prepared to spend about 7 hours total solving problems, and maybe about 5 minutes talking about your personal work experience.
Full day remote interview taking to various members of technical team. Involved virtual whiteboard explanations of machine learning systems you would build to solve various made up problems. Engineering focused not theoretical plus a coding test.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you build a machine learning system for face recognition to admit people into an office building?
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Lyft (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2020
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn to see if I'd be interested. After a half hour call with the recruiter, I was invited to a 45 minute technical phone screen with a Research Scientist. The 45 minute phone screen covered a range of topics from estimating the probability of a conversion, to optimizing a linear model, to describing how to build a model to predict conversion.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given that there are N session and they convert with probability q, what is the expected number of converted sessions?
If there are two sessions that both convert with probability .5, and we know that one of them converted, what is the probability that they both convert?
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Lyft
Interview
Got the interview by referral. Someone from Lyft contacted me, and asked me to respond to 4-5 questions about my background, my skills, and how I can contribute to Lyft. Then I had a technical phone interview; about 45 minutes. It was fairly straightforward. In a few days, I'll do their take-home challenge.