Airbnb Data Scientist Interview Experience — HM Screen Where the Role Didn't Match the JD

The HM started off by introducing what the team does, saying this team works on analytics-related stuff. He also mentioned there are two other data-related teams besides this one: the data science team and the modeling team. According to the HM, when the analytics team has work that needs research or a deep dive, it gets handed off to the data science team. I'm not totally clear on how Airbnb divides responsibilities across its data teams — it feels like analytics and DS partially overlap. The HM asked if I had any questions about the role, so I asked about the parts of the JD I wasn't clear on, and that's when I realized what this HM described as the job's responsibilities was really different from what the JD said, which I found pretty strange.

Like, to give an example of how far off it was — the position is mainly supposed to be about analysis and strategy, but he said the role was about monitoring ML model results. LOL.

After that it was mostly self-introduction — talking about the projects I'd done, the experiments I'd run. They asked a lot about the experiments part; they seem to really care about experiments.

Overall the interview left a pretty average impression.