Recruiter contacted me based on my resume, gave a great overall view of the company but nothing I wouldn't expect from a startup and steps that the interview process would entail. Met with a member of the data science engineer team, explained overall process and nothing out of the ordinary, no technical questions just how much experience I had with Python and SQL...I thought it went well with great back and forth and was expecting to receive the case study, however I received a rejection email two days later saying they received better candidates. I emailed with what I could've of done better...did not receive an email back. Overall I thought the process was easy but really don't understand why I didn't get the case study to further assess my skills.

I had a HR phone screen, a one hour light technical covering basic knowledge of stats and machine learning, followed by a take-home project. The phone screen and light technical were standard and fine. The take-home stunk of trying to steal free work. And if it wasn't meant for that, it certainly felt like it. I was given an arbitrary amount of time (they asked me to tell them when I would submit the project for scheduling review), and a quoted "average completion time" of 3-4 hours. That was a joke. The project was described as a "case study" that came with a ~1gb dataset in two tables. The ostensible goal was to calculate some grouped metrics with some instructions -- "How often does X happen in a group of actors with condition Y". Had this been the actual project, it might have been reasonable. However, it was actually an ask for a fully extensible framework, with loggin, debugging, analysis, arbitrary adaptation to new input parameters (of which no examples were given other than the case study at hand), and complete terabyte+ size scalability. You know, the sort of thing that would a core system at a company like this. After putting in 5x the amount of time "as average" (since I had never touched their data before and have no framework available from having done these before), I received a rejection email. This is despite having been assured I would be presenting my results and discussing them with the relevant parties. To their credit, they gave feedback. That said, it was telling. Amongst the feedback was a complaint that my variable names were too specific to the _case study they asked me to do_, as if I couldn't trivially replace the variable names. I can not be sure they were trying to steal my time and my work, but I will reiterate that at minimum, it feels that way. This was an unreasonable project to give as a take-home, and I do not recommend entering this process.