Attentive Interview Questions & Experiences

Attentive·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Attentive DS interview that was basically a live incident triage case. They dropped a real-sounding SMS delivery degradation scenario on me and wanted the whole nine yards: metrics, slicing, hypotheses, experiment design, rollback. Pretty intense for a single session.

US SMS delivery rates dropped ~6.5 percentage points starting at a specific time window, affecting two major carriers but not Canada or UK. A new link-shortener domain and updated carrier registrations had just rolled out. Walk through how you'd triage this.
How would you slice the data to isolate where the delivery drop is coming from?
What artifact or system-level checks would you do before jumping to statistical analysis?
How would you design an experiment to test whether the new link-shortener domain caused the drop?
What would your rollback plan look like, and what evidence threshold would you need before declaring the incident resolved?

“This was the whole interview basically.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Attentive software engineer interview with a meaty system design question built around a backend worker service. The whole thing was one extended scenario that kept layering on constraints, which I wasn't fully expecting.

A backend worker reads large objects from object storage, applies a string transformation, and writes the result back. Workers have 1 GB of memory and a 10-minute timeout, but some inputs are several GB. Jobs are crashing in production. Walk through how you'd triage the crashes and figure out whether the root cause is malformed input, a bug, memory pressure, timeout, or a dependency problem.
How would you redesign the service to process very large input objects without loading the entire object into memory at once?
When processing input in chunks, how do you ensure correctness if a character run spans the boundary between two chunks?
What observability, testing, and recovery mechanisms would you add so that failures like this are easier to catch and fix going forward?

“This part I actually felt okay about.”

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Attentive·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

A stats-heavy question from what seemed like a technical screen for a DS role at Attentive. The whole thing centered on one scenario about multiple testing across 30 brands, which sounds manageable until you're actually in it.

A company runs an A/B test on a new message-sending method across 30 independent brands, each with a 50/50 control/test split at α = 0.05. Two brands show a significant lift, one shows a significant drop, and the other 27 show nothing. What conclusions can you draw, and how do you handle the multiple testing problem here?

“My first instinct was to say 'two out of thirty is actually pretty good' and I almost stopped there, which would've been embarrassing.”

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Attentive·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Attentive and got hit with a stats-heavy A/B testing question that required knowing your multiple comparisons theory cold. Not a casual conversation.

A new messaging feature is A/B tested across 30 companies independently, each with a 50/50 split and a significance threshold of 0.05. You see 2 significant positive results, 1 significant negative result, and the rest are not significant. What do you conclude, and how do you handle the multiple testing problem before deciding to roll out the feature?

“This one stung a bit because I jumped straight to 'two uplifts, feature works' before catching myself.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Attentive for a software engineer role, focused entirely on building a broadcast messaging service. Pretty deep dive, they pushed hard on the scheduling and delivery reliability parts.

Design a broadcast messaging service that lets companies schedule messages to all their subscribers at a future time, with support for querying by time range and guaranteed eventual delivery.
What does the storage schema look like for companies, subscribers, scheduled broadcasts, and delivery state?
Walk me through how the scheduler determines which broadcasts are ready to be sent.
Is a simple polling model acceptable for the scheduler, and how would you improve it at larger scale?
How do you handle idempotency, retries, duplicate prevention, and failures in the delivery pipeline?
Should the recipient list be evaluated at schedule time or at the time the message is actually sent?

“Big open-ended one to kick things off.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Coding round at Attentive for a software engineer role. One algorithmic problem, started with a constrained version then had to generalize it, which is a format I wasn't fully expecting.

Given a string and an integer k, repeatedly remove contiguous groups of exactly k identical characters, concatenating the remaining parts after each removal until no more removals are possible. Return the final string. Start by solving the case where k is fixed at 3, then generalize your solution to any k.

“The warm-up framing threw me a bit.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Attentive software engineer interview with a system design question centered on building a notification/broadcast system. The problem had a few moving parts and required thinking through scheduling, dedup, and state management on the fly.

Design a notification system that sends broadcast messages to company subscribers based on scheduled times. You're given a company-to-subscriber mapping and a list of broadcast logs with scheduling and delivery status info. Implement logic for two modes: one that takes a single current time and sends all overdue unprocessed broadcasts, and one that takes a time window and sends broadcasts scheduled within that range. Also explain how you'd prevent duplicate sends and track delivery state.

“The core question isn't hard to grasp but the details pile up fast.”

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Attentive·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Got a pretty intense diagnostic case question for a Data Scientist role at Attentive. One question, but it was a beast, covering everything from instrumentation sanity checks to causal inference to experiment design. Not a vibe-check round at all.

Ride volume at a major rideshare platform drops 14% month-over-month and 9% year-over-year after normalizing for days in the month. Walk through how you'd (a) confirm the drop is real and not a data artifact, (b) decompose it into demand-side vs supply-side causes, and (c) quantify the top two root causes. Be specific about metrics, data cuts, statistical methods, and any experiments you'd run to validate your hypothesis.

“This one took me a while to even organize mentally.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Attentive SWE interview that started as a straightforward coding design problem and then pivoted mid-question into a more complex polling and scheduling design. The interviewer kept layering on follow-ups until it felt less like one question and more like a full system design session crammed into a single problem.

Design and implement a message broadcasting service given a mapping of companies to subscriber lists and a log of messages with timestamps. Send each company's messages to its subscribers.
Extend the polling approach to support a time range [t1, t2] instead of a single current timestamp.
Design the API surface for this service, including broadcast, subscribe, unsubscribe, and schedule operations.
What storage model would you choose for the logs and subscriber lists, and why?
Design a scheduling API that fires future broadcasts at specified times.

“The initial version felt manageable.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026

Behavioral round with the hiring manager at Attentive for a Software Engineer role. Three blocks: standard behavioral stories, a deep project dive, and a future goals conversation. The project deep-dive apparently runs long so come prepared to defend every decision you made.

Tell me about a time you had a significant impact on a project or team.
Describe a situation where you dealt with conflict on a team.
Walk me through a project from your resume, including the technical decisions you made and the trade-offs involved.
How did you handle a situation where you had to make decisions without clear requirements or direction?
Tell me about a failure or a project that didn't go as planned.
Where do you want to be in the next one to three years, and how does this role fit into that path?

“Pretty standard opener but I always underestimate how specific they want you to get.”

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