Tinder Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

Had an online assessment with some SQL queries. Then a phone screen with the recruiter. Then a take-home assessment, followed by a final interview with the hiring team where we went over the take-home and answered a few basic questions.

It was a standard process. I talked to the recruiter about the data team at Tinder. I decided to stop the process there, but it would have been a typical data interview with the hiring manager and a panel if I had continued.

The interview process was pretty standard. It started with an HR call where they asked typical HR questions like 'why are you interested in this role?' and also behavioral questions such as 'tell me about a time you took the initiative...'. They also threw in a couple of brain teaser-type questions, for example, 'if a Tinder subscription renews monthly, why might we see a dip in new subscriptions during October?' (The answer they were looking for was that September has 30 days, while October has 31). Following that, there was a coding take-home assessment which included one SQL question, one Python question, and one open-ended question. The SQL part was challenging, involving things like joins and window functions. My SQL attempt passed 5 out of 7 tests, and I'm still not sure what the exact issue was, which was frustrating because in a live coding setting, it would have been clear I knew how to do it. They use a system that automatically scores based on test case passes and speed. The Python question was very basic, just a groupby, but then they specified the output needed to be ordered in a particular way. When I sorted it according to their requirement, it failed the tests. Upon comparing my output to their expected outcome, it turned out their expected output wasn't actually sorted as they'd requested, while mine was. So, I removed the sorting from my code to pass their tests. I have no clue how many more tests it runs or if anyone actually reviews the code after the automated scoring. I left notes in my code explaining the discrepancies and also included commented-out code showing how I had attempted the sorting.