I applied online. I interviewed at Petal in Oct 2020
Interview
A 30 minute background call with a recruiter followed by a take home data loading and transformation assignment.
If you pass the take home then the recruiter will schedule a full day face to face meeting over Zoom with about 11 people over a span of 6+ hours
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Tell me about the time you had a challenge in a project
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Petal in Jan 2021
Interview
To start had a 30 minute phone call with one of their tech recruiters and went over what i was looking for along with what what the role and company was all about.
I should start by saying - the mission seem solid, maybe just the folks they have interviewing are trying to serve some self purpose (get their own people in) or just are not experienced enough.
Next were all the tech rounds with two members of the data engineering team.
First one was with a guy on the data eng team that gave me a couple schemas and had a bunch of sql questions. There are always multiple ways of going about any question - if he wanted something specific he should have asked about it. I answered all the questions correctly and thoughtfully. I constantly checked to ensure he was ok with my solution (which he was) and it made sense. He actually was not really familiar with common concepts in sql (even case statements, as he took 10 mins to try and walk through my solution in his head bc he didnt get it lol). I dont believe he was quite qualified to interview me as he didn't know basics. From the feedback i got this is the interview where i was told my sql is not strong enough. This interview is where my negative feedback stems from, it is frustrating i was penalized bc the interviewer was not knowledgeable and qualified.
Second interview was pretty good in my opinion, it was a higher level design problem. Guy seemed pretty straight forward and as if he knew what was going on. Great conversation - nothing negative here.
I was told a couple days later that the first tech round did not go how they wanted and they would not be moving forward.
My advice for the organization. Please have qualified engineers conduct interviews. It is a complete waste of my time to work on an at home assignment (which the more i think of it, might have just been something they needed done and farmed out to interviewers) and multiple interviews if I can't be judged by a competent engineer.
Interview questions [9]
Question 1
SCHEMAS:
cards
customer_id (INT) card_number (VARCHAR) open_date (DATE)
3612 4733-8080 2/15/2020
1825 5743-6687 2/3/2020
1825 4521-3390 5/15/2020
transactions
transaction_id (INT) card_number transaction_datetime (UTC) transaction_amount (DECIMAL)
2214 5743-6687 02/20/2020 17:00 122.76
2652 5743-6687 02/27/2020 08:15 3.63
3456 4521-3390 06/02/2020 13:44 89.17
daily_customer_addresses
customer_id home_address state report_date
2051 123 Main St NY 08/29/2020
2051 123 Main St NY 08/30/2020
2051 123 Main St NY 08/31/2020
SYSTEM DESIGN:
This model isn’t very user friendly for analysts. We want to build an analytical model within Redshift. Here are some of the questions these analysts might want to answer:
1.) How many applications were approved? How many yesterday?
2.) How many of these applications were manually decisioned?
3.) How many potential customers dropped off between Prequalification and Application?
4.) What is our distribution of customers by income?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Petal (New York, NY) in Jan 2019
Interview
A recruiter from the company contacted me for the position of a senior data engineer in New York. He scheduled me with someone for a CoderPad exercise. I was called three minutes late. The call lasted about thirty minutes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a constant-time Python 3 implementation of LRU cache. Use any Python data structures. The provided unit tests must pass. You have 15 minutes.
