Research Data Scientist (University Grad) -

Interview Expectations - Final Round

TEAM OVERVIEW:
The Infrastructure Strategy group is responsible for the strategic analysis to support and enable
the continued growth critical to Facebook’s infrastructure organization, while providing
independent analysis to achieve the optimal value for most Infrastructure costs. You can be a
part of how Facebook scales to the next billion users!

INTERVIEW PROCESS:
The onsite interview consists of four technical interviews and two behavioral interviews, each
lasting 45 minutes to 1 hour. One of the behavioral interviews is conducted by one of the hiring
managers in the team, during which you can ask any questions you might have about the team
or the day-to-day work of research data scientists.

Data Science Coding [1 hour]

During this interview, we present a small to medium-sized data set and interview instructions
that contain the question you should answer using the provided data set. The focus of this
interview is not on how good a model you can build in an hour, but on whether you select
features and preprocess data thoughtfully, whether you can diagnose performance issues with
the model, and whether you can use the model to draw useful insights. You should feel free to
search for commands and function syntax on the internet during the interview. However, we
recommend that you have commonly used commands at your fingertips given the time
constraints of the interview. For this interview, you may choose between R (e.g., Rstudio) and
Python (e.g., Jupyter notebook).

As the interview progresses, the interviewer will check the time to make sure we have enough
time to cover both exploratory data analysis and model building stages and may ask you to
move on to the next steps or narrow down the scope of your analysis to a few variables for the
sake of time. Otherwise, this interview is self-guided, in the sense that the interviewer will expect
you to lead the discussion while asking clarifying questions on the way.

To prepare for this interview, we recommend practicing by making use of freely available
datasets through resources like Kaggle. Remember also to think aloud, guiding the interviewer
on your thought process as you work on the data set.
Problem Solving [45 minutes]

During this interview, you will be asked to start from an open-ended problem statement, possibly
a hypothetical project at Facebook, and verbally design an e2e data science solution. For
example, the interviewer may pose the question, “How would you design a recommendation
system for people you might know?” You are then expected to ask questions to the interviewer
to learn more about the context and plan a data science solution step by step. The interviewer
may ask clarifying questions at times, but you should expect to lead the discussion.
For this question you won’t need to write any code, but you might sketch out ideas using the
provided tools (e.g., coderpad or Google drawing during a VC interview) if needed.

Based on the discussion between you and the interviewer, the interviewer assesses your ability
to
• Understand the question and frame it as a data science problem
• Define appropriate metrics, if applicable
• Identify necessary data sources and sampling strategies
• Propose applicable statistical or machine learning methods
• Compare pros/cons of different approaches
• Define a successful outcome and propose an evaluation framework
• Communicate results to technical and non-technical audiences

Stats/ML [45 minutes]

During this interview, the interviewer will assess the depth and breadth of your knowledge in
Probability/Statistics and Machine Learning. You should expect to be asked questions on the
basics as well as any techniques on your resume in which you have prior experience. It is a
generic type of an interview rather than focused on specific deep technical expertise on a
certain subject.

The interview will cover the following topics that a “generalist” data scientist should be aware of.
They include:

• Probability Theory
• Hypothesis Testing
• Supervised Learning (Classification, Regression)
• Unsupervised Learning

Coding: Data Structures & Algorithms (w/ SWE) [45 minutes]

During this interview, you will be asked to solve one or two conventional interview coding
problems using the language you are the most comfortable with. The interviewer will use a
shared screen website (Coderpad: https://coderpad.io/). Please note that you cannot execute
the code you write on coderpad, but you may find some of Coderpad’s functionalities, such as
syntax highlighting, useful.

We do not require coding competence at the level of a software engineer. In case this gives an
idea on the difficulty of the coding problems, we recommend that you practice on sites such as
leetcode so that you can solve Easy problems with ease and some Medium problems. In
particular, we look for knowledge in topics including
• Data Structures
o Arrays and lists
o Dictionaries
o Hash tables
• Complexity Analysis (Big-O)

The interviewer will assess your competence in four core areas:

• Communication Are you asking for requirements and clarity when necessary, or are
you just diving into the code?
• Problem solving We’re evaluating how you comprehend and explain complex ideas.
Are you providing the reasoning behind a particular solution? Developing and comparing
multiple solutions? Using appropriate data structures? Speaking about space and time
complexity? Optimizing your solution?
• Coding Can you convert solutions to executable code? Is the code organized and does
it capture the right logical structure?
• Verification Are you considering a reasonable number of test cases or coming up with a
good argument for why your code is correct? If your solution has bugs, are you able to
walk through your own logic to find them and explain what the code is doing?

Tips:
• Iterate. If you can’t come up with the optimal solution right away, describe a brute force
solution first, do an algorithmic complexity analysis, and then suggest improvements to
your first solution.
• Take Hints. If the interviewer asks you clarifying questions or gives you suggestions,
pivot your approach (if it makes sense) using the provided hints.
• Verify with example inputs as well as edge cases. Write down what values your code
should return given example inputs and edge cases to make sure your solution is
correct.

Resources:
• Cracking the Facebook Coding Interview Videos (The Approach and Problem Walk-
through. The password is FB_IPS.)
• Top 10 Algorithms for Coding Interviews from Program Creek
 • Book: Cracking the Coding Interview
• Book: Elements of Programming Interviews
• Leetcode
• InterviewBit
• HackerRank

Behavioral / Project Retrospectives [45 minutes]

Other than the technical interviews discussed above, we have two 45-minute behavioral
interviews during which the interviewers will have the opportunity to get to know you better.
These interviews are important for the team, because we operate in a heavily cross-functional
environment where building relationships with partners and communicating technical concepts
clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders are often instrumental for the success of
projects.

To prepare for these interviews, we recommend that you take the time to review past projects
you have worked on, reflecting on both technical and non-technical challenges you faced while
working on your class projects or in a lab. Some example questions that you might be asked
include

• Tell me about a project you worked on. What was the goal of the project? What were
some technical challenges in the project? How did you overcome the technical
challenges?
• When working in a group, how do you decide who works on which portion of the project?
How do you resolve disagreements when team members have different opinions?

Resources:

• Linked is a post on Facebook’s core values. This is how we work together to give people
the power to build community and bring the world closer together. We look for people
who believe in these values and demonstrate them through their daily work.
• Here is more insight from our Head of People on qualities we look for in our future team
members.

ABOUT THE TEAM:

Here is a list of published work from the team.
• Large Scale Time Series Analysis for Infrastructure Reliability
• MaRS: How Facebook keeps maps current and accurate
• Mapping roads through deep learning and weakly supervised training
• How AI-powered maps help improve vaccination campaigns and rural electrification
• Scalable statistical anomaly detection to resolve app crashes faster