How To Interview a Data Scientist Daniel Tunkelang Presented at the O'Reilly Strata 2013 Conference Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUTuESHKbXI Interviewing data scientists is hard. The tech press sporadically publishes “best” interview questions that are cringe-worthy. At LinkedIn, we put a heavy emphasis on the ability to think through the problems we work on. For example, if someone claims expertise in machine learning, we ask them to apply it to one of our recommendation problems. And, when we test coding and algorithmic problem solving, we do it with real problems that we’ve faced in the course of our day jobs. In general, we try as hard as possible to make the interview process representative of actual work. In this session, I’ll offer general principles and concrete examples of how to interview data scientists. I’ll also touch on the challenges of sourcing and closing top candidates.