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3 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Others·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

A coding-style question for a Data Scientist role, which felt a bit unexpected. Had to write a Bash snippet to find the largest file under a directory recursively. Not the kind of thing I practice regularly so it was a bit of a scramble.

Write a Bash function that recursively searches a given directory and returns the size in bytes of the largest regular file. If no regular files exist, return 0.

“I knew find and stat existed but blanked on the exact flags mid-interview.”

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Others·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Took a technical screen for a Data Scientist role and got a tree traversal problem that looked deceptively clean on the surface. The core challenge was making parent-ancestor lookups fast enough for large inputs, which pushed me toward thinking about binary lifting rather than naive traversal.

Given a rooted tree represented as a parent array, answer multiple queries where each query asks: starting from node u, if you move up to the parent k times (stopping at root if you run out of ancestors), which node do you land on? Design an efficient solution for large n and q.

“My first instinct was just to walk up the tree k steps per query, which is fine for small inputs but obviously falls apart at 2e5 nodes and queries.”

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Others·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Got a SQL question for a Data Scientist role, one problem, conditional aggregation with quarterly breakdowns. Pretty standard warehouse-style question but the edge case around coins with zero transactions tripped me up a bit.

Given a coins table and a transactions table, write a SQL query that returns one row per coin with the summed transaction amounts broken out by quarter (Q1 through Q4) for a given year, plus the total transaction count and total amount. Coins with no transactions in that year should still appear with zeros.

“My first instinct was to just filter by year and group by coin, which got me the totals fine.”

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