Triplebyte Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process included an initial online multiple-choice screening, followed by a phone interview, and potential onsite interviews. The multiple-choice part was simple enough, but the screen-sharing interview experience wasn't great. The person interviewing me was remote, only part-time, and primarily a software background person doing screen share interviews for TripleByte. I didn't feel they truly understood the data science subject matter. The interview focused heavily on just repeating information. Their feedback was mostly unhelpful, like saying a method was wrong because they hadn't seen it before, or pointing to an article for the 'right' way to think about something, which I took to mean they lacked the technical ability to evaluate approaches different from their own. They might be suitable for software roles, but I don't think the interviewer had the necessary technical skills to properly evaluate data science candidates.

The interview was 2 hours. The first hour was a sample app, then 30 min for short answer questions, and the last 30 min was system design. I was asked to build a trello-style board for the sample app. They said they didn't expect me to finish, but then they told me I didn't get far enough in it. I spent time explaining the architecture and design for the app, which took away from my building time. It felt like they ignored that I had a full design plan and only cared that I only got about half of it built in the time given. They also docked me points for not going deep enough into the backend for system design, even though this was a front end job.

The recruiter reached out, and they were really chill about scheduling around my availability. First up was a phone screen with the Hiring Manager. Then came the onsite, which was about 4.5 hours at their HQ. The office felt kinda dead, and honestly, I could tell it wasn't the right culture fit for me. It's true that visiting in person gives you a better feel for things. The HR person who handled all the scheduling saw me but didn't even say hi, which was weird. She ended up whispering to me, seemed a bit timid. I was then led to a conference room. The 4ish hours went like this: Intro with leadership, a design problem working session (they focused it on their specific product, which I didn't love), a quick visual design exercise, presenting that exercise, and finally, chats with the Product and Engineering teams. My impression was that there's some leadership tension and the team is super picky, even though the people seemed nice.

First, there was an online quiz with 35 questions that was timed. After that, a 2-hour phone/screen sharing interview was scheduled. It's really important to practice coding under time pressure because I got too caught up in error-handling and didn't finish much. Also, be concise and know your technical definitions and data structures well. There's also a timed debugging section where you need to fix code to pass 4 test cases. I managed to find 2 bugs before time ran out. Seriously, practicing coding and debugging with a time limit would have been super helpful.