Introduction with recruiter then technical interview.
First interview was great with the recruiter. It took three weeks going back and forth to find a time to have the interview. Very messy process. Then once I sent my availability for the last time, they scheduled the interview out of the time I had given.
The technical interview was the worst. It was an otherwise easy sql problem, but right in the beginning the interviewer gave me a totally incorrect tip, which threw me off and got me scratching my head on how to solve it without that step. My answer was incorrect and I knew that at the end of the interview. If that was on purpose, not a company I would work for, if it wasn’t, the interviewer should just let the candidate work on the problem instead of giving out tips while I was organizing my thoughts on how to solve it.
I emailed the recruiter to give them feedback which was answered but nothing was done about it.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Talk about about your past experiences. Go deeper into this project.
I applied online. I interviewed at Sia (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2025
Interview
A recruiter reached out for a phone interview. I had a technical interview with a Senior Data Scientist consultant at Sia. It lasted 45 minutes and included three SQL questions and one Python question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I had a 45-minute technical interview with a Senior Data Scientist consultant. The session included three SQL questions and one Python question, focused on sales transactions and data manipulation. One point of friction was that the interviewer asked me not to use window functions and instead pushed for a GROUP BY solution. While I adapted under pressure, I felt the conversation was more rigid than collaborative.
Overall, the process was structured and timely, but I would have appreciated more flexibility in the problem-solving approach — especially for senior-level candidates who may use different methods to arrive at the correct solution.
