EBay Data Science Interview Questions - Acing the AI Interview

eBay recently acquired Expertmaker — a company that has created an advanced AI platform enabling optimization and automation.They already use machine learning algorithms to recognize objects in listings, find similar products and rank recommendations. They deploy AI in various areas, from structured data to machine translation to risk and fraud management.

My AI Interview Questions articles forMicrosoft, Google , Amazon , Netflix , LinkedIn , Twitter , Walmart , Apple , Facebook ,Salesforce andUber have been very helpful to the readers. As a followup, next couple of articles were on how to prepare for these interviews split into two parts,Part 1 andPart 2. If you want to find suggestions on how to showcase your AI work please visitAcing AI Portfolios. For Career Insights check out the expert interview section . Now onto the eBay Data Science Questions article…

Interview Process

eBay Interview process is pretty straight forward. There is a phone screen followed by an onsite interview. There are four to five consecutive interviews onsite. These interviews consists of past experiences and project case studies, technical interviews on statistical and SQL knowledge.

Important Reading

1. Introducing Krylov: AI Platform that Empowers eBay Data Science and Engineering Teams: GPU Technology Conference 2018
2. Innovations in Recommender Systems for a Semi-structured Marketplace: eBay: Yuri M. Brovman, Data Scientist, eBay, NYC 2017
3. Data Science/ML Archive: eBay Blog Archive

AI/Data Science Related Questions

• How could you improve the accuracy for customer query?
• Suggest a modelling process for a binary classification task with skewed and unbalanced data.
• You observed two gambling machines for a period of time: one of them occasionally give rewards; the other one never give any rewards. Which one do you pick to play with?
• Build a model to identify customers interested in receiving ad emails.
• Case study: eBay has to identify the cameras from the other junk like tripods, cables and batteries what is the approach? Data looks like Title, description of the product, Price, Image,…etc
• Given a function roll() that uniformly returns a double between 0 and 1 and a array/list of numbers of length N (no duplicates), create a function shuffle() that returns a permutation of equal probability
• In linux, how to search a string in a Gigabytes file and print that string in the terminal.
• What is the total length of all the roads in San Francisco?
• Explain PCA, SVM, Backpropagation, Hidden Markov Models and Viterbi Algorithm.
• Explain boosting, bagging and stacking.
• What is CRF?
• What is Naive Bayes?
• What is a language model?
• Estimate the average number of transactions on eBay per day.
• There is a file of size 100 gb and you have given a memory of size 100GB. How you will sort the file on basis of ASCII. File is having line of text inside it. No line in the file is repeated.

Reflecting on the Questions

eBay has a long history of Data Science in the company. The team was not created as a result of the current hype but has been around for almost a decade. The questions reflect this maturity. There are also some questions which are brain teasers or puzzles. Based on their blogs, they use Hadoop, Spark and TensorFlow for Deep Learning.

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The sole motivation of this blog article is to learn about Twitter and its AI technologies helping people to get into it. All data is sourced from online public sources. I aim to make this a living document, so any updates and suggested changes can always be included. Please provide relevant feedback.