I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Lyft (San Francisco, CA) in Aug 2017
Interview
The interview process I had was:
1. Take home test (24 hour time limit)
2. Two technical 45 min phone interviews
3. Onsite with five 1:1 technical interviews (all whiteboarding)
The team took way too long to get back to me after I completed the onsite. I had waited almost 2 weeks without hearing anything from them. I only heard back after I chased the recruiter on it -- only to receive an extremely curt response that the team was passing on me. When I requested feedback, the recruiter said that they don't like giving feedback to candidates. This really suggests that the company doesn't prioritize transparency and accountability in their hiring (e.g. can they strengthen and standardize their evaluations enough to feel good about releasing them?) and that they don't value the candidates' time and effort (e.g. what is the candidate getting out of this insanely long and arduous process if they're not learning where they can improve?).
Additionally, this was the most narrow-minded data science interview process I've ever heard of. This is the first time I've seen a company give *only* technical screens throughout the entire interview process. I get that it's a technical role, but it leaves a bad impression when you're evaluating candidates on only one dimension of their abilities, when data science is necessarily a very multi-dimensional role. Contrary to how other companies do it, they also didn't seem to want to bother digging into my past experience and project work (which I would have been happy to be tested on), and instead wanted to continuously test me only on the same two or three concepts that are apparently emphasized in their own data science team.
Aside from the structure of the interview process: most of the data scientists who interviewed me were very nice and accommodating. They kept the interviews and case problems somewhat interesting, and, in turn, gave thoughtful answers to my questions. Save for one of them who was pretty rudely dismissive to me when I asked them whether their team is interested in X field of data science.
I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Lyft
Interview
The first round is good, but the second round they asked me something about conditional probability, and ask you to solve a real problem within some time. It made me feel nervous, with two people staring at you
I applied online. I interviewed at Lyft (Toronto, ON) in Jun 2026
Interview
They scheduled an screening interview and then scheduled for a technical data science interview mostly on experimentation and stats + prob. They sent a blog about the interview which is basically about how to answer their questions.
I interviewed with a recruiter last fall. Since I was graduating in eight months, she said she'd talk to the hiring manager about whether to send technical interviews now or hold off for different openings in the future, and would get back to me in a few days. She never followed up and didn't respond to my emails. Eventually, I got an automated rejection, the subject line literally read "Update on [insert job title]," they hadn't even bothered to fill in the job title. The whole process felt unprofessional.