Essex Lake Interview Questions
& Process

I went through 4 rounds of interviews with managers at different levels. The interviews were mostly technical, focusing on data handling and similar topics. Guesstimates were the primary type of problem in all rounds. There was one in-person round.

I first got an email from a job portal, then I emailed them back and HR got in touch. HR mentioned there would be 3 technical rounds and then a final HR discussion about salary and start date. The interviews were: Round 1 was supposed to be general but was a deep dive into my resume and machine learning projects, including learning techniques, parameters used, and some basic data structure questions like sorting and binary trees. Round 2 involved a general chat about Machine learning, my research interests, and distributed computing, covering fault tolerance and distributing ML algorithms. Round 3 was focused on big data analytics; they asked about handling 100MB vs 5TB of consumer data, inference goals, and how to process the 5TB file without distributed computing, suggesting entropy for sampling.

It was a really engaging, mind-bending, and tough process. We dove into case studies, guesstimates, and puzzles, alongside some really insightful questions about my CV. They were mainly checking for my drive, my past experiences, any international exposure I had, and if I had decent analytical chops.

There were excel questions with general aptitude. Aptitude questions involved series and alphanumeric series, with a 60-minute duration. Puzzles like candles and bulbs were included (not too complex). There were also general HR questions about working long hours and willingness to relocate.