Leidos Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

I had two virtual meetings with the hiring manager. The first one was a general intro, and then they assigned me a take-home project. The project involved data transformations with some unusual file types. I submitted three different solutions, detailing the pros and cons of each and making a final recommendation. They then sent me an angry email requesting the full code and documentation, not just a report. I provided the code for one solution, making some modifications and embedding my signature within the code and comments. After submitting, I was ghosted – no response to follow-ups. Months later, someone from LinkedIn contacted me about my previous work, stating they were from out of the country and got the job. They mentioned using my interview project in production for Leidos, and it wasn't even the best version I provided. It seems they put my code into production without proper review, which is really disappointing.

It was a super long and frankly useless interview process, taking over 4 months from the initial screening to the final onsite results. Got contacted in early April, and after some basic tech questions, I had a phone call with the Hiring Manager a week later. I almost forgot about them after two months of silence, but in early June, they called back to schedule an onsite interview for the end of June. They covered all travel and accommodation expenses, even offering a rental car which I didn't need. The onsite itself was average, with SQL, Tableau, Java, and Python tasks. The people were nice, though. They said I'd hear back in two weeks, but I waited five weeks for an automated rejection email. Good thing they didn't pick me if they lack basic empathy. And to top it off, I'm still waiting for my expense reimbursement after six weeks!

I had an untimed coding assessment where I had to implement a specific data analysis on a dataset. After that, I had a behavioral and technical interview with two research scientists. Then, there was a short, informal interview with a research scientist and someone from upper management. The behavioral interviews also included some math and CS theory questions. They weren't super structured, mostly asking me to talk about my resume experiences.