DoorDash·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen
Aug 2025
DoorDash data science case focused entirely on a real operational scenario: a 12% drop in completed orders in LA. The whole thing was one big structured problem, broken into diagnosis, experiment design, and quasi-experimental fallback. Dense and technical, no fluff.
- Completed orders in a major market dropped 12% week-over-week. Walk through how you'd build a funnel-based diagnosis to determine whether the issue is supply-side or demand-side, including what cuts, plots, and thresholds you'd use.
- If supply shortage during the dinner peak is your leading hypothesis, design an experiment to validate it. Cover the randomization unit, primary and guardrail metrics, power assumptions, sample size, duration, and how you'd handle spillover and seasonality.
- If a randomized experiment isn't feasible, what quasi-experimental method would you use instead? Describe the setup, pre-trend checks, and robustness tests in enough detail that another analyst could run it.
“This is the kind of question where you can talk for 20 minutes and still feel like you barely scratched it.” The rest of the author's notes on Data Scientist interview at DoorDash, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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