communication

Most working data scientists state the definition wrong, and interviewers know exactly which wrong versions to listen for. The correct one-sentence definition, the VP translation, and the three classic traps.

The only round where you choose the problem, which sounds like a gift and is where most candidates lose it. Four things get graded in one flow, and the fourth is the one engineers skip.

Graded on two things most engineers never practice: the quality of the analogy and knowing when to stop. Here's a two-minute script that lands with a legal exec, and the depth trap to avoid.

A live translation test of the FDE's core skill: same facts, different altitude. There's a four-line formula execs actually read, and one translation error that destroys trust.

Candidate reports describe a Palantir round where you are handed unfamiliar material, given time with it, and asked to explain it. It is the job in miniature: an FDE learns a customer's domain in a week and has to be useful by Thursday. The scoring is on what you chose to teach, and on what you admitted you did not learn.

The one derivation every GPU-infra loop expects on a whiteboard: scatter-reduce plus all-gather, 2(N−1)K/N per GPU, and why that's provably near-optimal. Plus the latency catch that motivates tree algorithms.