I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Google (Mountain View, CA) in June 2016
Interview
An employee send them my CV and a recruiter contacted me the next day with a questionnaire of 13 questions asking to describe a project, what language I use etc. Questions that are typical in an HR interview. Then they moved me to a phone screen. The interviewer was very friendly asked me in the beginning about the research in my PhD and the 3 questions, one probability question, one coding questions and then described a scenario and we brainstormed on this; ended up a two-sample proportion hypothesis test. After a few days they moved me to an on-site interview that it took a while to schedule though. The on-site included 4 interviews, some of them heavily on the probability and statistics side (you must be well prepared!), on practical problems and some coding questions as well. All interviewers were very friendly and down to earth!
- Asked foundational questions about key definitions and terminology to assess baseline understanding of core concepts
- Completed a timed online coding assessment covering practical programming challenges and problem-solving ability
30 minute phone screen with HR, followed by an interview with the hiring manager. HR would not even provide a salary range for the role, which was very weird. The HR rep was not familiar with the role and seemed to be reading from the JD when I asked questions about it.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Google (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2021
Interview
Recruiter screen > tech screen > 5 tech sessions at remote "onsite"
Tech screen: all statistics written in easy python
On-site: python for SQL-style queries, one session focused on stats/probability, majority of sessions had some probability in it, some question were extremely open ended, hierarchical statistical models, optimization and creating penalty functions, bootstrapping, small sample statistics
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
you are given a discrete probability distribution of children, what is the probability a random women you meet on the street has a sister?
Two variables x1 and x2. They are correlated but aren't the same. X3 = X1-X2 and X4 = X1+X2. What are the coefficients for x1 and x2 if you train logit for x3 and x4
1000 ad videos, 1000 human raters
Assess the quality of videos, 100 randomly selected videos to each rater, Rate video between 1 (bad) and 10 (good) quality. How would you rate these? What are the pros and cons of your strategy?
clustered statistical modeling question about how you would set data up for this model and what model you would use.