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    Yahoo Research Scientist Interview Questions

    Interviews at Yahoo

    10 Interview Reviews

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    Helpful (2)  

    Research Scientist Interview

    Anonymous Employee in Sunnyvale, CA (US)
    Accepted Offer
    Positive Experience
    Average Interview

    Application

    I applied in-person. I interviewed at Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA (US)) in April 2017.

    Interview

    One day long:

    Mixture of probability questions and coding. Coding was simpler that some other places. just linked list, arrays, and trees. No DP. Probability questions were mostly easy. Some tricky though. The last interview was more into technical details of a subject that was specialty of interviewer. It was fast and a bit aggressive.

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    Interview Questions

    • - Write order traversal using stacks (not machine's and recursively).
      - Three sum with dulicates.
      - Finding array's max range in O(N).   1 Answer

    Other Interview Reviews for Yahoo

    1. Helpful (2)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Easy Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Yahoo.

      Interview

      I got a phone interview with a hiring manager. There were no technical questions asked, just some general questions about my past research, what methods were used, etc., followed by very general Q&A about what their team is doing. I realized quickly that it was not a good match. Turned down after a week after the interview.

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      Interview Questions

    2. Helpful (2)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Sunnyvale, CA (US)
      No Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA (US)) in December 2015.

      Interview

      I applied online and the interview process took about 2 months. I had a phone screen with the hiring manager and same day I was asked to schedule a phone interview with a team member. The phone interview was one hour long and I was asked many questions (not the standard 3 questions style), including my research, about a variety of simulation algorithms and a brain teaser. Next day I was moved to the onsite interview that was scheduled a month after. This included 6 interviews of 45min and a talk. It was a very long day but I recommend you should study about the problems your team is interested in and some literature on it. I did really well in the statistics questions but not in the machine learning ones. I was contacted after 3 days with no offer.

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      Interview Questions

      • Newton-Raphson method, Gibbs sampling, Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, Delta method, Missing data, clustering   Answer Question
      • You have a coin, how can you make a uniform in (0,10)?   Answer Question
      3. Join the Yahoo team
      See Our Latest Jobs

    3. Helpful (4)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      No Offer
      Negative Experience

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Yahoo.

      Interview

      There were two rounds of phone interview. The first round interviewer was quite professional. Asked detailed research questions and machine learning methodologies. Questions are quite basic and touch base. He then went through two spam related questions regarding model building. Both are interesting and problem driven. The experience was quite positive and informative.
      The second round interviewer was a Chinese. He didn't seem to be able to communicate well in English. I asked what would be covered before interview. He didn't specify computer would be needed. As the interview started, he said "I'm sending you a question through email." and asked me to load the question. Luckily I was next to a computer. He failed to describe his question properly and kept interrupt my thinking process. When I coded wrongly, he started laughing. I actually wanted to stop this conversation because his lack of respect. He then started questions related to my research and projects. He failed to ask question to the point. It always took me at least more than two try to understand what he wants to know. The interview was exhausting and not constructive in any way. I only wish to end the conversation sooner.

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      Interview Questions

    4. Helpful (2)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Employee in Sunnyvale, CA (US)
      Accepted Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Easy Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA (US)).

      Interview

      I received my first interview through a friend who already worked at the company. She introduced me to a director who initially had one of his employees interview me for a position on his team. While I was not a good fit for that team the director connected me with another group at Yahoo. I restarted the interview process with them and was successful.

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      Interview Questions

      • The interview was not particularly difficult. There were questions about the process behind specific mathematical methods. However, the majority of questions asked how I would approach particular situations at work. Ex. If you need to inform a business unit about the success of x what would you do.

        One of the more difficult questions was:
        Use this white board to explain how multiple regression works.   Answer Question

    5. Helpful (3)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Sunnyvale, CA (US)
      Declined Offer
      Positive Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 8 weeks. I interviewed at Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA (US)) in April 2014.

      Interview

      Two phone interviews – one with the hiring manager, one with a researcher. Both friendly, focussed on research and methods. Onsite was very pleasant, if a little disorganized. The questions were mostly research-oriented and focussed on machine learning problems. There were a few high-level interviews, as well as one or two coding-related ones.

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      Interview Questions

      • Clustering on large, sparse datasets – how would you approach the problem?   1 Answer

    6. Helpful (2)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Sunnyvale, CA (US)
      No Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA (US)) in March 2014.

      Interview

      Applying for Research Scientist that requires PhD in Computer Science or related fields.
      First there are two phone screenings that ask Machine Learning fundamentals, statistics, your research work, and how to solve research problems. If you did well, you are invited to an on-site interview which includes an hour-talk (your thesis topic or any research you have done) and 6 one-to-one interviews. In an one-to-one interview, you are asked to explain your approaches for given research problems, your intuition for modeling, how to implement your idea, and some technical coding questions.

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      Interview Questions

      • How to rank documents without queries (using only user id)? How to complete online query suggestion in mobile? How to build an inverted index? What is spatial SVD?   1 Answer

    7. Helpful (1)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate in Sunnyvale, CA (US)
      No Offer
      Neutral Experience
      Difficult Interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Yahoo (Sunnyvale, CA (US)) in January 2014.

      Interview

      I gave a 30 minute presentation to a dozen or so people, covering a paper I had published, after which they asked some questions. I had one-on-one meetings with four or five people. They took me out to lunch. The whole process took most of the day.

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      Interview Questions

      • They asked many technical questions about natural language processing and machine learning. For instance, describe the operation of a hidden markov model. What is the state of the art for part of speech tagging.   2 Answers

    8. Helpful (3)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Employee
      Accepted Offer
      Positive Experience
      Average Interview

      Application

      I applied through an employee referral. The process took 6+ weeks. I interviewed at Yahoo.

      Interview

      The interview process included two 1 hr phone interviews and one full day on-site interview. Phone interviews were mainly research based questions while on-site interviews were both research based and technical. I can say that in comparison with other interviews, the Yahoo interviews were more professional and definitely suited the position much more than other interviews. They avoid all those stupid whiteboard codings and stick to fundamental questions and research based easy to very complex scenario questions. Although very tiring, I enjoyed my onsite interviews. They were all bright and smart people and very professional and they make you feel that you are on the same page with them. I would say 50-60% of my interview was research questions (easy to difficult) and 40-50% are more technical questions. The technical questions were about machine learning, algorithms and optimization.

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      Interview Questions

      • How will you encode the world's knowledge for learning algorithms if 1) you have unlimited human resources 2) you have to do it automatically with no human resource.   Answer Question

      Negotiation

      The negotiation phase was not very open and somehow limited. Their offer was fair so you can't negotiate much.

    9. Helpful (2)  

      Research Scientist Interview

      Anonymous Interview Candidate
      Declined Offer
      Positive Experience
      Easy Interview

      Application

      I applied in-person. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Yahoo in August 2010.

      Interview

      i was alreayd in yahoo, and wanted to move to research. so i talked to folks in research on phone.

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      Interview Questions

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