How I landed my internship at DataRobot
Already in my second semester of MS program and I started applying for summer internships. I was very specific about what I wanted to do and which kind of company I wanted to work for. Any startup which is building data product and should be located in downtown area of Boston. The reasons were simple. I don’t wanted to move to another place for period of 4-8 months and I like to work in startup where you can build things faster.
With those goals, I applied at many companies and the one which eventually extended me offer was DataScience Product Startup called DataRobot. I had heard about this company before through one of their employee. I met him on September 2017 at Boston Startup Week event.
The DataRobot has 3 rounds of engineering interviews for intern. My first round was with Brian Bell, second with Scott Lindeman and third with Glen Koundry.
First Round: (with Brian Bell Jr) The first round was about finding out if I am a good fit for company and role. That basically means, if I can code in Python and have some experience around data science libraries. The google hangout call started with introductions. Brian asked me to tell him about my project work and past experience with python. I had couple of projects that I mentioned in my resume, so I re-iterated them and then I told him, “Either you can ask me more questions on python or I can show you the recent project I was working on.” Brian liked the idea and next 40 minutes were more of a code review. I pulled up Pycharm and started discussing different modules of project starting from configuration management to database services and business logics. I received compliments on my style of organizing project and code. Brian started talking about company and rest of the interview rounds. That made clear that I am up for the next round.
Second Round: (with Scott Lindeman) I was notified through email on my next round schedule and name of the interviewer. I looked up the profile of Scott Lindeman and learned that he is Northeastern University Alumni. I joined the video call as scheduled. Scott introduced him self and told me that he was in kiev, Ukrain at that time. After 5 min of small talk, he told me that interview with his will not have coding question but it will be on system design questions. Following were the questions that he asked and we discussed.
- Given a dataset in CSV or JSON, what kind of metadata you can take out from it?
- Let say you have multiple node cluster & all of them have logs, generated locally by some application. you want to query each logs based on some key like IP address or username. how will you do that?
- How HDFS works?
- What kind of projects you have worked on?
- Which programming language you like and why?
Scott expressed that he was happy with all of my answers and notify the same to HR. He also told me to be prepared for next round and do some coding practice.
Third Round: (with Glen Koundry) After getting away for two rounds without coding, I was pretty much sure that final round will have coding questions prepared for me. But to my surprise, that was not the case. I started my interview with Glen and he also did not ask any coding questions. Interview with Glen was also more of a discussion on projects that I worked on in my from previous employment. He asked about architecture of the web scraping product, I built for previous company. The challenges I faced in different projects and how I overcame them. Also discussions on pros and cons of python as programming language.
Almost at the end of 6 months and I worked on two project at DataRobot. The amazing work environment, cool office near downtown and smartest people from tech industry. My internship at DataRobot is one of the best thing happened with me after I moved in US.