I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
The interview was for the inference data science group. I'm a candidate with ~15 years of experience in statistics and data science, with a quantitative Ph.D. I was asked to complete a data challenge, which is not unusual among DS jobs, but was not appropriate for my level of experience and demonstrated ability as a coder and researcher. With a family and many personal responsibilities, doing free work in the form of a data challenge -- rather than showcasing a real-world project I've done in the past -- was (in my opinion) not a good use of my time, and not a good way to screen for this position. I did the data challenge, got asked to proceed to the next step, and then declined. I decided it was not a place I wanted to work if this was the way senior and experienced candidates were being screened (as though I was a new undergrad with an unproven track record of past code and work).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Data challenge was a project to build a statistical model to identify drivers of bookings on Airbnb. Data file was messy, and very realistic. Problems were very unstructured, and I used a lot of my own theory and style to craft a solution and make business recommendations based on my work. Also asked about designing an A/B test to get more clarity on the issues if more than observational data were made available. Wrote up a ~8 page memo with my results. Project took me about 2 days on a weekend.
After a recruiter call, I had a technical screen with SQL and basic product analytics questions.
The onsite was four interviews: presentation on a past analytics project, SQL, data analysis question, and analytics study. In the data analysis question, I was given a dataset and asked to find insights while working with the interviewer. Overall, it was not technically too difficult and the process was very well organized. Everyone was professional and nice. I thought I did well, but I didn't get an offer and I'm not sure what I did wrong.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
-- Revenue is down 10%. What do you do to investigate?