Cyence·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
May 2026
Interviewed for a data science role at Cyence and got a meaty system design problem about entity matching in a restaurant database. The kind of question that sounds straightforward until you're actually in it trying to explain your approach out loud.
- How would you design a system to match incoming new restaurant records against an existing large restaurant database, handling duplicates and ambiguous entries?
“I started talking about string similarity on restaurant names and got about two sentences in before realizing that's nowhere near enough.”