VideoAmp Interview Questions
& Process

It was a 3 step process. First, I had a screening call with the hiring manager. Then, I had a technical interview with two engineers where they asked me questions about programming languages and SQL. Finally, I had an onsite interview with three engineers where they asked me a variety of questions.

The first interview was with HR, which was super informative and had a great conversational flow. Really positive vibes. The next step was meeting with the VP of the team. Unfortunately, he was late, seemed spaced out, and I got the impression he'd already made up his mind. Near the end, he commented, 'Well it doesn't sound like you have much experience selling to agencies,' which was a bit surprising given that six years of my career was spent selling to and working with some of the top agencies in LA.

The interview process included two HackerRank assessments that focused on MySQL and Scala skills. This was followed by an on-site interview. The first on-site stage involved a straightforward coding task in Scala, where the goal was to fix code so that unit tests would pass. After that, two engineers presented a simple Scala and MySQL problem. Then there was a 20-minute discussion with the program manager. The final round was with the Engineering Director, discussing strategies for scaling a REST API to handle millions of requests. The engineering team was pleasant to interact with, though the interview felt a bit disorganized. I was initially told I'd receive detailed feedback within three days, but this didn't happen. My follow-up emails and voicemails went unanswered, leading me to contact one of the interviewers on LinkedIn for a response. The day after I reached out, I received an email stating my rejection, without any specific feedback on why, despite solving all their problems and reaching the final interview stage. The process also involved a promise of travel cost reimbursement for my non-CA residence. After submitting my receipts, there was no response. An update mentioned that after posting a review and speaking with a friend who referred me, VideoAmp contacted me a week later, apologized for the situation, and promptly reimbursed my travel expenses.

A third-party recruiter reached out to me. After I learned about the role and company, the recruiter forwarded my resume to their HR. Initially, I had a screening call where we discussed basic concepts like supervised vs. unsupervised learning and the differences between kNN and Kmean. Next, I had a technical phone interview, which was unexpectedly a video call. The interviewer, a data scientist, asked me about Bayesian probability in a coin toss, general probability, and some math problems. I struggled with the Bayesian question, but the interviewer guided me, and then asked a follow-up to check my understanding. It was a positive experience with challenging data science questions. Following that, I received a take-home data challenge focusing on biased selection correction, which took me about 6 hours. I felt I did a good job, but received no feedback, which was disappointing and seemed unprofessional. Then came the second technical interview, also a video call, where I was given a coding question. It was a medium to hard LeetCode level problem (similar to what I prepared for Amazon ML), and it took me 45 minutes. I didn't finish it with an O(n) solution. I'm unsure how this single question evaluated my overall data science experience, especially since they didn't discuss my resume or my current role as a data scientist.