Facebook’s Official Note to Data Scientist Candidates

If you’re getting ready for a Facebook data scientist interview, they will ask you an analytical case study.

Here’s more information about what you’ll receive from their HR team:

Analytical Portion (10-20 minutes)

The analytical case study will focus on questions to gauge your product sense.

For the analytical questions, the interviewer is trying to understand how you solve business questions and problems, as well as how creative and articulate you are at thinking through these problems while solving them. It’s not about the arriving at the perfect, or correct answer, but how you engage with the problem.

Spend some time engaging with Facebook products less as a user and more as someone who is tasked with improving or developing these products. The link below outlines what we consider a “Facebook product” [Ads, Mobile, Timeline, News Feed, Messaging, etc.].

Analytical Resources:
Facebook Products
Facebook News

Put yourself in the shoes of the product team who built the product / feature

• Why do you think they made certain decisions about how it works?
• What could be done to improve the product?
• What kind of metrics you would want to consider when solving for questions around health, growth, or the engagement of a product?
• How would you measure the success of different parts of the product?
• What metrics would you assess when trying to solve business problems related to our products?
• How would you tell if a product is performing well or not?
• How would you set up an experiment to evaluate any new products or improvements?