Factual Data Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I applied on the company website and then got a phone interview about a week later. The phone interview was all about behavior questions. After that, I had an online test that was based on regular expressions.

It started with an online coding question, which wasn't too hard and had multiple ways to solve it. After that, I had an on-site interview that lasted pretty much the whole day, around 5-6 hours. During the on-site, I faced behavioral, technical, and problem-solving questions, and I met with each person on the team separately.

I was really excited to interview at Factual, but it ended up being a terrible experience. The HR person was nice and informative in the first call, telling me I'd need to do a project for a second interview. I asked for the project for a lower-level Data Specialist role he mentioned, and he sent both. The projects were cool and challenging. I put a lot of effort into both. The Specialist one involved finding Yelp restaurant details with regex. I sent that in and got a second interview for that role. The Data Engineer project was to write a program to find words in a word search. This took longer but was more fun. I made sure it was perfect and sent it, thinking I'd really impressed them. Then, the guy I was supposed to interview with canceled four times, with no warning, sometimes just minutes before. After the fourth cancellation, I was pretty disappointed and skeptical about working there, though the HR guy remained nice and apologetic. I finally had my second phone interview, and it seemed like the interviewer wasn't paying attention to my background. Then he asked if I'd done the project! I was shocked, as I'd spent so much time on it and he hadn't even looked at it. I told him I'd done both, and he seemed surprised. He then asked some vague but challenging scenario questions, and I talked through my approach to solving them. I guess my answers weren't what they wanted, as I didn't get the job. When I asked about the original Data Engineer role, I was told I couldn't be considered because I didn't get the lower one, which I wish I'd known beforehand.