Boston·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Two coding problems for a Data Scientist role at Boston, 20-25 minutes each. Pretty standard stuff but they wanted full docstrings and complexity analysis on top of working code, which tripped me up a bit on time.
- Write a function that checks whether a given string is a palindrome, comparing characters exactly as they appear with no case normalization or punctuation handling.
- Write a function to check whether a string of bracket characters is a valid parentheses sequence, handling all three bracket types and correct nesting order.
“Seemed easy and it basically was, but I almost over-engineered it by adding case folding before re-reading the prompt.”