Skip to contentSkip to footer

Senior Scientist Interview Questions

Salaries
Interviews

5,826 senior scientist interview questions shared by candidates

You will be improving the function you developed prior to interviewing and will be thrown a lot of curveballs at the whim of the interviewer — because you won’t actually run your function or work with data be expected to be asked vague and poorly worded questions. This person will likely be extremely junior and have little tenure at the company or as a data scientist but definitely smarter than you — they may have taken a coursera course on modeling — so don’t expect to be able to prepare or get an offer as its extremely arbitrary and has nothing to do with your experience or ability to add value other than writing perfect code on the fly while being interrupted with vague questions with apparently very specific answers.
avatar

Senior Data Scientist

Interviewed at Skillz

3★
Nov 9, 2019

You will be improving the function you developed prior to interviewing and will be thrown a lot of curveballs at the whim of the interviewer — because you won’t actually run your function or work with data be expected to be asked vague and poorly worded questions. This person will likely be extremely junior and have little tenure at the company or as a data scientist but definitely smarter than you — they may have taken a coursera course on modeling — so don’t expect to be able to prepare or get an offer as its extremely arbitrary and has nothing to do with your experience or ability to add value other than writing perfect code on the fly while being interrupted with vague questions with apparently very specific answers.

Straight forward question of predicting a variable given the data set. Catch here is that the data set is dirty, the dataset is nuanced and there's very little time. I got the feeling that the objective here was to overwhelm the candidate to see how they'd do.
avatar

Senior Data Scientist

Interviewed at Faire

3.8★
Apr 29, 2024

Straight forward question of predicting a variable given the data set. Catch here is that the data set is dirty, the dataset is nuanced and there's very little time. I got the feeling that the objective here was to overwhelm the candidate to see how they'd do.

Each day a quarry-worker is given a pile of stones and told to reduce the larger stones into smaller ones. The worker must smash the stones together to reduce them, and is told to always pick up the largest two stones and smash them together. If the stones are of equal weight, they both disintegrate entirely. If one is larger, the smaller one is disintegrated and the larger one is reduced by the weight of the smaller one. Eventually, there is either one stone left that cannot be broken, or all of the stones have been smashed. Determine the weight of the last stone, or return O if there is none. Example weights = [1,2,3,6,7,7]. The worker always starts with the two largest stones. In this case, the two largest stones have equal weights of 7 so they both disintegrate when smashed. Next the worker smashes weights 3 and 6. The smaller one is destroyed and the larger weighs 6 - 3 = 3 units. Then, weights 3 and 2 are smashed together, which leaves a stone of weight 1. This is smashed with the last remaining stone of weight 1. There are no stones left, so the remaining stone weight is 0. Function Description Complete the function lastStoneWeight in the editor below. The function must return an integer that denotes the weight of the last stone, or 0 if all stones shattered into dust. lastStoneWeight has the following parameter(s): int weights[n]: an array of integers indicating the weights of each stone Constraints • 1 5n≤ 105 • 1 ≤ weights[i] ≤ 109
avatar

Senior Machine Learning Scientist

Interviewed at Wayfair

3.1★
Sep 3, 2024

Each day a quarry-worker is given a pile of stones and told to reduce the larger stones into smaller ones. The worker must smash the stones together to reduce them, and is told to always pick up the largest two stones and smash them together. If the stones are of equal weight, they both disintegrate entirely. If one is larger, the smaller one is disintegrated and the larger one is reduced by the weight of the smaller one. Eventually, there is either one stone left that cannot be broken, or all of the stones have been smashed. Determine the weight of the last stone, or return O if there is none. Example weights = [1,2,3,6,7,7]. The worker always starts with the two largest stones. In this case, the two largest stones have equal weights of 7 so they both disintegrate when smashed. Next the worker smashes weights 3 and 6. The smaller one is destroyed and the larger weighs 6 - 3 = 3 units. Then, weights 3 and 2 are smashed together, which leaves a stone of weight 1. This is smashed with the last remaining stone of weight 1. There are no stones left, so the remaining stone weight is 0. Function Description Complete the function lastStoneWeight in the editor below. The function must return an integer that denotes the weight of the last stone, or 0 if all stones shattered into dust. lastStoneWeight has the following parameter(s): int weights[n]: an array of integers indicating the weights of each stone Constraints • 1 5n≤ 105 • 1 ≤ weights[i] ≤ 109

Viewing 431 - 440 interview questions

Glassdoor has 5,826 interview questions and reports from Senior scientist interviews. Prepare for your interview. Get hired. Love your job.