SoundCloud Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

I had a call with HR and then an hour long interview with someone in technical leadership. I was not asked any technical questions at all during this interview, only soft skill questions such as "how do you make decisions?" and "what is your leadership style?". For a senior technical role with no people management duties, I was surprised to say the least, the questions were what I would expect of a management or VP role. I tried to give technical specifics at various points in the interview but was generally shut down by the interviewer asking me to be *less* specific. I then heard nothing for two weeks... even after sending a follow up email a week later. In the end the recruiter got back to me telling me they were not moving forward with me due to my interview performance, in particular I had not given a satisfactory answer about trade-offs on a project. In general the process didn't seem particularly professional for a senior technical role. How they could assess my application with no take home exercise and no technical questions is beyond me.

SoundCloud's interview process was pretty disorganized, probably due to their recent struggles. It felt like they were trying to get free work on their user engagement, track skipping, and mobile download problems. I had a phone screen with HR where we discussed the next steps and my concerns about spending too much time on their unpaid coding challenge using company data. I usually cap unpaid challenges at 8 hours because expecting more is unethical and potentially illegal if it's productive work. The HR rep said I could limit my time to about 8 hours and to return it within a week. I ended up spending around 12 hours on it. They took two weeks to get back to me asking to reformat my notebook, but then said the original format was fine. Another two weeks passed before they gave me feedback on the challenge, so I waited a total of four weeks for that. The feedback was strange; I was penalized for not providing annotations even though I clearly annotated everything and explained my reasoning. I was also penalized for answering a question as written. For example, when asked to recommend playlists using SQL or another language, I used SQL and was told I 'ignored' the part about using another language. I pointed out how ridiculous that was. They also penalized my SQL code for not running, even though I used general dialect pseudocode since I wasn't given a specific dialect or data to test with. For the question about increasing downloads, they said I only suggested feature correlations, when I wrote a paragraph with other suggestions. In the data modeling part, I was again told I didn't provide annotations, despite doing so. For track skipping, my definition was called 'questionable' when they should have specified their desired definition. When I reminded HR about the 8-hour limit we discussed, she denied saying it and instead said the assignment was 'intense' for a 'difficult position' that takes 16-20 hours. She then condescended about my transition from freelance to full-time and my other job prospects, which felt irrelevant to the miscommunication and bad feedback.

I applied online and about a month later had a phone screen with a recruiter. Then came a data challenge, followed by a first Skype interview with the data science manager where we talked about my graduate research and how I would build a specific model. The last interview was with a senior data scientist and was supposed to be technical, but it wasn't. Instead of going over my data challenge, they just asked about my graduate research again. No stats, coding, or problem-solving questions.