Education: PhD in Computer Science
Years of Experience: 5 YOE in SWE
Prior Experience: Interned at Visa with the Research Data Science team
Date of the Offer: Spring 2021
Company: Microsoft
Title/Level: Data Scientist
Location: Redmond, WA
Salary: 10,000
Signing Bonus: 150K stock grant vested over 3.5 years
Bonus: Performance-based bonus up to 20% of salary every year
Benefits: General Microsoft perks - Gym, 401K...
Other details: Recruiter suggested might be able to make base 150K, however, this is too small compared to other companies.
Any thoughts?
Interview Experience
Was stragihtforward. Had 4 interviews with 4 people on the Data science team, mostly managers. Most questions were data science questions, mostly based on what I did in my past internship and what I'm doing for my research. Such questions included:
i. How do you preprocess your data - cleaning, dealing with outliers...?
ii. How do you determine what model to go with? Based on the task on hand...regression. classification...
iii. What metrics are you using? Is it accuracy only or are you considering others? Other metrics include precision, recall, F1...
iv. Handling imbalance in the dataset.
v. How do you determine if your approach is good enough? For instance, you want to deploy a model and want to determine if the new model is better than your previous model? - A/B testing (hypothesis testing.)..using tests of significance, such as the t-test and comparing it with your alpha threshhold.
v. I was asked 2 coding questions:
- Reverse a linked list
- Determine the missing number of a list of contiguous numbers that are sorted. i.e. 2, 3, 4, 6. Ans - 5. Use binary search.