I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Squarepoint Capital (New York, NY) in Dec 2016
Interview
This was for the position of a Data Engineer in their core data group. Skills with Python and some C++ are expected. The interviewer began by telling me about the company. Next, he discussed my experience at my most recent two positions. After this, he proceeded with a technical interview on coderpad. I recommend practicing various dynamic programming questions using recursive solutions.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Write a function to compute and return the number of ways in which to climb a flight of n steps, taking 1, 2 or 3 steps at a time.
Using Python, write a one-liner function to return a list containing only the unique elements of the given list. Order doesn't matter. Next, write a function to return an order-preserving list containing only the unique elements of the given list.
1-hour pair programming on a complex data engineering problem. The programming language was Python and the coding exercise was mixed with general questions about programming in Python. The interviewer also asked basics of sorting algoritms and along with time and space complexities.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Stream of orders to be cached and stored in a limited memory data drive
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Squarepoint Capital (Montreal, QC) in Oct 2024
Interview
Presentation of the company
Presentation of the team
Presentation of the role
Asked about previous projects
Asked about what I would have done differently
Asked about tools I use (with example projects)
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Interviewer had not a lot of experience and it showed in the way he conducted the interview
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Parsing strings
Math operations written with strings that you have to compute, Strings were not guaranteed to be valid.
Interviewer was not interested in my thought process or how I did the question, only if my code could pass the test cases.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Squarepoint Capital (London, England) in Aug 2024
Interview
Intense, 5 stages and very Python heavy, more core software engineering questions.
First stage asked me about decorator functions, context generator, Textual comprehension question where you convert stream of numerical numbers from an old phone keypad into letters, and to read a CSV file and find the max of a column.
No progression after getting 90%+ questions right.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you run multiple programs if threads are restricted by the python GIL
