Applied on the company website mid June 2025. I was then contacted for the first time at the end of June to submit all my university transcripts (besides just the degree itself). After that I was invited to my first interview in July.
This was a one hour interview with a person from HR/Recruiting. It was a little bit deeper than usual HR interviews but nothing too crazy and I enjoyed it. Afterwards, I was invited to do a Skill Test that was going to test me on 3 different tasks. For this I had to schedule in advance a time when I received the test and I could work uninterrupted for 3 hours (at home) and submit my results within this deadline. I was free to use any resources like AI so long as I explained how I used them.
This was an extremely difficult task to do within 3 hours. All three tasks required coding and working with a different dataset and the skills that they tested were very different and in vastly different data science domains. Individually the tasks were actually fine if given time, but it was physically not even remotely possible to do them on your own within 3 hours, so I did make a lot of use of AI, which I documented. Even then, I ended up almost not making it in time. It took them 3 weeks to review the submissions, but I was finally invited to a technical interview after receiving very good feedback on my submission.
This was actually two technical interviews one after the other. The first one was a 90 minute technical deep dive with the lead of that team, some of which covered the skill test. The second one was a 30 minute technical interview with two direct colleagues: one Data Scientist and one Data Engineer. In both of these interviews I got a huge number technical questions, one after the other. I thought I had done very well actually, as I was really prepared and I answered all the questions fully, except I think two where I didn't remember some details that are in my opinion trivial and can just be looked up.
I was told that there were going to be 2 more (!!) interviews after this if I passed to the next stage. However, after a few days I was emailed a generic rejection. I emailed back to ask for some personal feedback, given that I had put in an incredible amount of time and effort but I was completely ghosted.
Just something last to note: In the middle of the interviewing process I noticed that the job opening was reposted on LinkedIn, even though they had a large number of candidates already as I understood. Make of that what you will.