Sky Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

It started with a general aptitude/SJT test where you had to rank different job task options and do a simple logic test that wasn't timed. Then came an online 'Job Simulation' where you acted as an intern, doing things like writing an email to your manager and picking an algorithm for recommending shows to consumers. You also had to record yourself answering some questions.

Hey there, future data scientists! I'm sharing my journey with the SKY Data Science Graduate Programme application, hoping it helps you out. I saw the opening on Bright Network and applied on SKY's site back in early November 2023. The day after applying, I got an invite for an online assessment on SKY's learning platform. It had stuff about the job, life at SKY, and their values, plus case studies from departments like SKY Glass, SKY Mobile, and SKY Sport where I had to rank tasks based on scenarios with dashboards, emails, and videos. Then there was a logic test with patterns, relationships, and calculations from graphs. It was untimed, had 34 questions, and took me more than 3 hours. About a week later, I got another invite for a timed technical test on Codility. It had three tasks in Python and SQL. The first Python task was about figuring out the max orders we could fill. The SQL task asked for articles that always got a price increase on update. The second Python task was about a path made by moves. It was timed for 160 minutes. Even though I did great (93%), I got a rejection in late December before the Assessment Centre. The whole thing took about 2 months and over 6 hours of assessments, not counting prep. The assessments were cool and gave a good feel for the job and SKY's vibe. My advice: think hard if you're ready for the long haul till next September. Prep well and check out what others say. Be ready for tasks that might be different from Codility examples. It's a tough but informative process. If you really want it, put in the work. Good luck!

Weird interview process. You don't get to speak with the hiring manager about the role, as the first interview is a technical interview with 2 engineers where they grill you with questions on different subjects for 40 minutes. I thought they were too aggressive, one of the two interviewers even started to criticise and question the way we work in my team. They give you some general information about the role but from this point of view I found it very unsatisfactory as it is not enough information to understand the role and the team. To my surprise I was invited to the next stage which is a home technical test. I found it boring and very easy, but was not progressed on the basis that 1) I didn't check about missing values (my fault), 2) I used 'inefficient' 'for' loops instead of vectorised code, although the code ran very fast (<1 second) and the question did not mention anything about efficiency. Overall not a great impression, I think they should put more thought into their interview process and how they present themselves to candidates. An interview with the hiring manager to talk about the role and the team would have been appreciated (remember: not only you are evaluating the candidate, the candidate is also evaluating you). And I think for a senior level position it is not appropriate to have a technical task consisting of a sequel query and a linear regression.