The interview process was relatively good. It started first with a 30 minute informal chat with the recruiter, which went well. After that I had three rounds of interviews. The first interview was with a data scientist too, and that involved a series of technical questions as well as some coding the second round of interviews was with a lead data scientist, and this interview involved like a lot of like technical questions and not any coding. The last round of interviews was with hiring manager, and it involves some technical questions as well as some coding questions. Overall, I would say my interview process with them was great, although I think in my opinion, the process was a little long.
I applied online. I interviewed at Fortra (Toronto, ON) in Mar 2025
Interview
Fairly simple process. 3 rounds total. The first one is dedicated to a technical test, second one was about data science questions. I got rejected after that, so I don't know about the third round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Interview Questions (Data Scientist – Round 1 & 2):
Tell me about your background and relevant data science experience
How did you evaluate feature importance in your ML models (Random Forest, SHAP)?
What evaluation metrics did you use and why?
Coding:
Write a function to return the first repeating element in a list
OOP concepts: inheritance, use of super(), and behavior of shared/class variables
ML & Statistics:
Difference between mean and median, and when to use each
What is standardization and why is it needed?
Data imbalance techniques and how they work
Case / System Design:
Design an email classification system (spam vs normal)
What features would you use?
Follow-up: handling real-time constraints (latency), model drift, and model selection (LLM vs smaller models)