Overall straightforward interview -- but, make sure to know your ride-sharing metrics and how experiments look like at a ride-sharing company or else you are screwed. Interview process took 1 month.
FYI, in the Lyft context "Data scientist" = product analyst, for the most part
Process:
(1) Got referral to start process
(2) Phone screen w/ current data scientist. Go in depth with a past project, talk through the math of hypothesis testing ("why use a t-distribution in this scenario?"), talk through success metrics for a ride-sharing business case
(3) Take home: there are a set of questions you have to answer with a simple ride-sharing dataset (how to measure churn, set up experiment for recommendation to reduce churn) create presentation for on-site.
(4) On-site: 5 interviews. (1) Presentation of take home. My advice is to evaluate your definition of churn with a false positive rate and know about clever experiment set-up (i.e. splitting your experiment across multiple cities, etc.) (2) SQL test (3) business case -- be sure to know the unit economics metrics related to ride-sharing. Be able to answer questions like "what data told us to create Lyft shared rides?" (answer: overlapping routes in map data) (4) stats & probability: had to answer the hypothesis testing classic "Coin got x heads during y flips. How can we test if this is a fair coin" and then pivoted to an ride-sharing experimentation question (5) Core values interview: really cool to hear about how Lyft thinks about success, culture, and evaluating the performance of data science ICs
I didn't get an offer. Basically, if I were do this again I would do the metric prep that I did and then ALSO grab coffee with a friend working in ride-sharing data science to make sure I understand the metrics that matter.
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Outras avaliações de entrevista de vagas de Data Scientist da empresa Lyft
I interviewed with a recruiter last fall. Since I was graduating in eight months, she said she'd talk to the hiring manager about whether to send technical interviews now or hold off for different openings in the future, and would get back to me in a few days. She never followed up and didn't respond to my emails. Eventually, I got an automated rejection, the subject line literally read "Update on [insert job title]," they hadn't even bothered to fill in the job title. The whole process felt unprofessional.
Fui entrevistado pela Lyft (Toronto, ON) em ago. de 2025
Entrevista
“I completed all interview rounds — including HR, technical screening, product sense, business case, algorithm live coding, decisions live coding, machine learning, and experience interviews — but the company ultimately selected another candidate
Perguntas de entrevista [1]
Pergunta 1
Have a good understanding of stats/probabilities/ML/Coding(SQL,Python), and business domain and metrics.