Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

It was just one interview. They asked me to go over the technical specifics of the AI projects listed on my resume. No coding or behavioral questions were asked. The interviewers were really friendly and chill overall.

I applied early in the year and within a few weeks got an email for a phone interview. The phone interview lasted about an hour and I was asked to explain items on my resume, followed by a short coding question where I coded the answer on a collaborative website. The interviewer could see my work and asked about my logic. The remaining 20 mins were for my questions about the lab and their work. About 2 weeks later, I was invited for an in-person interview. I asked to postpone it for a few months since I was finishing school, and the lab was accommodating. The in-person interview was 9 hours long, consisting of 9 one-hour interviews, each with 1-3 people from the lab. The interviews weren't particularly challenging individually, but the whole day was tough due to its length, requiring mental sharpness. They asked about every detail on my resume, so be prepared to explain everything. I heard back 2 weeks later and was offered a job, with the official offer taking another 2 weeks.

I applied for a data scientist position via employee referral. A recruiter contacted me and pointed me to the Data Science Institute job listings. About two weeks after applying, an administrator got in touch to set up a phone interview with two data scientists from LLNL. I was given a list of available times and scheduled one, but on the day of the call, one interviewer called to reschedule for the following week. After another reschedule with the administrator, we finally had the interview. The two interviewers called, and after I was asked to write down a dial-in number for a teleconference, they opened by asking if I had questions for them. I asked about their projects, roles, and the dynamic between the computation team and research groups at LLNL. Their responses were brief, and they didn't seem very engaged or interested in selling the company or the work. Then, they asked me about my resume, academic ML projects, and work experience. Around 45 minutes into the hour-long call, one interviewer suddenly asked if I had a computer nearby, mentioning a coding portion for the first time. I confirmed I did and was given a URL for a pair coding platform. The interviewer then struggled to recall the question before asking me to 'convert a base 10 integer to a string representation of base 7'. I wasn't fully prepared for this and only got a partially correct, non-recursive solution. They said I was on the right track but it wasn't fully correct. After a brief, halfhearted explanation, the call ended. The administrator emailed a rejection the next morning. The experience was disappointing due to the interviewers' apparent disinterest and disorganization, and the relevance of the base-7 conversion question for a data scientist role. It felt like they were unprepared and learning to interview on the fly. It seems interviewing might be a way to get brownie points for yearly reviews at LLNL, so knowing how to recursively convert to base-7 might be beneficial for those wanting to contribute to LLNL's data science and ML efforts.