I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Affirm (New York, NY)
Interview
Part 1: The first part of the interview process was a 30-minute phone call with a recruiter. The recruiter was extremely friendly. This part is basically to check if you are human.
Part 2: A week later I had a 60-minute "technical" interview with a member of the data science team. The person I talked to was nice enough, but she was also a poor interviewer. Problems started from the beginning when I had to ask for the person's name several times (it was an English name, just poorly pronounced). I had to ask the interviewer to repeat things throughout the rest of the interview, and I felt that the interviewer had difficultly understanding my responses even though I am a native English speaker. The more frustrating part of this interview was that the technical questions themselves were pretty boring, and the interviewer only seemed to interested in boring answers. I asked the interviewer about the machine learning group, and was told that they wrote down "crazy formulas". I finished the interview feeling that I hadn't been understood, on multiple levels, and also feeling that maybe this team was not something I really want to be a part of.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Does an ROC curve change if you square the outputs used to generate it?
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I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Affirm
Interview
One phone screen and one on-site technical interview. Phone screen was on feature interpretation of machine learning models. On-site was 5 hours, with technical and theory questions. The technical were really nice because they gave a real data set to play with. This is a key difference from other companies and gave me a sense that they understand what data scientists do. Whiteboarding with data, in my opinion, is just nonsense. You have to see and visualize the data to understand it and what issues you may have with it. The theory questions were fairly standard stats/machine learning questions, though some were tricky.
I left the interview with a good impression of the company and with the feeling that they understand the role of data scientists within the company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Here's data in tabular format, import, explore the data, and build a baseline classifier.
Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a review. We strive to provide a positive and engaging interview experience for all candidates, and we’re glad to hear you left with a good impression!
The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Affirm in Jul 2019
Interview
Their recruiter contacted me. We talked over the phone briefly and they scheduled a call with one of the team members. The second call was ok. We spent lots of time convincing each other about our understanding of some ML techniques. After one day, recruiter sent me rejection message.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How we can measure the importance of features in regression? and then some special cases.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Affirm
Interview
I had a great recruiter interview. But the second round was really awkward. At first, they missed my call and rescheduled it after 40 minutes of original time has passed. The rescheduled call wasn't very good either. The interviewer shows zero patience and seems to be pretty pissed when I can't answer the question. I was constantly talked over when I was struggling with the questions. Overall it was a disappointment after that great recruiter call
2
Affirm response
7y
Thanks so much for taking the time to leave a review. We strive to provide a positive and engaging interview experience for all candidates and we’re sorry to hear your time with us did not reflect this.