BlackBerry Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

The interview was a one hour panel session. They looked at coding skills, logic, and a personal experience question. The coding part was an easy/medium leetcode question.

This interview experience was with Cylance in Irvine, even though they've been acquired by Blackberry. The interviewer, who was a Cylance employee, came across as intellectually hostile. He seemed like the type who's gotten a PhD and his main goal was to challenge my knowledge, constantly asking 'why?' to everything I said. It felt like peeling an onion; he just kept digging deeper and deeper into the details until I couldn't explain anymore and hit a dead end. He wouldn't stop until that point.

It started with an HR phone screen where they talked about the job and my background a bit, and told me what to expect for the hiring manager interview. Then I had a 1 hour interview with the hiring manager. They were super technical and didn't really talk about my past work. It was split into two parts: the first 30 mins was all about deep learning mechanics, and the last 20-30 mins was a coding challenge. The time was tight but the question was fair - implement a common ML algorithm in python. This interview was more about neural network mechanics than others I've done. They were really focused on the technical and coding parts but were nice, and I think it was a good fit for the kind of person they're looking for.