I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Google
Interview
I have a friend there. I sent him my CV and after a week or so a google recruiter reached out to me.
At first they sent me by email like 10 or so questions. I had to write the answer and then send it back to them. Questions were the typical stuff you would get in an HR interview. They focus on the languages you know and description of a project. SQL and R seem to be the main languages they look for, I knew it from my friend already so I heavily targeted my answers towards those.
After this, they assigned me to a specific team for the recruiting process. It was SMB ads.
Then they sent me a data challenge. Nothing particularly hard. I had to send it back within 3 hrs. There are a few online resources for takehome challenges and this was definitely on the easy side compared to what I used to prepare.
Then they booked my trip to SF for a 1 day of interviews. Lots of stat questions: estimators, different distributions, and linear and logistic regression in details. No puzzles, which surprised me cause I heard so much about google puzzles (I even bought and practiced so much on that wall street book).
I didn't get the job, but the experience was very positive. I think they look for statisticians more than general quant people with some stat knowledge like me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A questionnaire, a takehome challenge and lots of stats questions. Know well linear regression and logistic regression. For instance, they ask you to derive the OLS formula on the board.
- Asked foundational questions about key definitions and terminology to assess baseline understanding of core concepts
- Completed a timed online coding assessment covering practical programming challenges and problem-solving ability
30 minute phone screen with HR, followed by an interview with the hiring manager. HR would not even provide a salary range for the role, which was very weird. The HR rep was not familiar with the role and seemed to be reading from the JD when I asked questions about it.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Google (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2021
Interview
Recruiter screen > tech screen > 5 tech sessions at remote "onsite"
Tech screen: all statistics written in easy python
On-site: python for SQL-style queries, one session focused on stats/probability, majority of sessions had some probability in it, some question were extremely open ended, hierarchical statistical models, optimization and creating penalty functions, bootstrapping, small sample statistics
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
you are given a discrete probability distribution of children, what is the probability a random women you meet on the street has a sister?
Two variables x1 and x2. They are correlated but aren't the same. X3 = X1-X2 and X4 = X1+X2. What are the coefficients for x1 and x2 if you train logit for x3 and x4
1000 ad videos, 1000 human raters
Assess the quality of videos, 100 randomly selected videos to each rater, Rate video between 1 (bad) and 10 (good) quality. How would you rate these? What are the pros and cons of your strategy?
clustered statistical modeling question about how you would set data up for this model and what model you would use.
