I applied through university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Nov 2017
Interview
The process starts with a 15 minute call with the recruiter that covers basic questions about your background and level of interest. It's nearly impossible to mess up this step. My recruiter was incredibly kind and courteous. The following interview is an ~1 hour video conference with a coding (SQL, Python, or R) question and analysis question focused on a proposed change to one of their products. This interview is conducted by a data scientist. Mine arrived late, wasn't very nice, and was kind of condescending. It seemed like they thought this was a waste of their time. I failed this interview step most likely because I don't have the requisite experience in defining KPIs. In all honesty, this position seems more like a "data analyst" position that they relabelled "scientist" in order to attract more applicants. In the analytics team, it seems like they are only performing descriptive and inferential statistics--not building predictive models. The next step would have been an on-site interview had I made it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an event-level table of interactions between pairs of users (note that there aren't duplicates in one day for one pair of users), for each possible number of "people interacted with" find the count for that group in a given day (i.e. 10 people interacted with only one person, 20 with 2, etc.).
The Interview Process is very structured -
First Tech Screening round - 45 mins (usually can extend a bit depending on the interviewer)
- 2 SQL Questions ( Medium to Hard ) - based on Joins
Full Loop - 4 rounds 45 mins each.
- SQL
- Behavioral
- Analytical Execution - stats & prob, A/B testing, case study
- Analytical Reasoning - Case study
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions on Bayes Theorem, Probability distribution, etc.
I applied online. The process took 6 months. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
Completed 3 rounds of the process, which includes the initial recruiter screen, technical, full loop, and team matching.
Couldn't move past the full loop interview. The interview was very engaging, and I actually enjoyed working through the cases. No crazy questions.
It's all organized. Be prepared to showcase your depth of thinking. Two analytical rounds will make you think on your ability to solve probability and experimentation problems. Have a structure for everything