You will find the most comprehensive overview of how to apply for a data scientist position at Shopee Singapore. I will mention a number of resources that you may find helpful to prepare for the Data Scientist interview at any company.
Students or non-experienced data scientists will be able to benefit from this article as they prepare for an interview for a data science position at Shopee Singapore. If you are already working as a data scientist, you will learn about what to expect in the interviews, how to prepare for your technical interviews, and how to impress your interviewers.
I have been to many interviews for a data scientist position at Shopee Singapore since 2019. Each failed interview has forced me to identify my weaknesses. To increase my chance of landing an interview, I tried every medium to gather others’ experience and sought out experienced people who could help me prepare. In the first round, getting your resume passed is easy; any error you make in the rest of the interviews could cost you a final offer. In order not to experience the costly failure I had in the past, I want you to avoid it.
While I cannot guarantee that the scenario you will be encountering will be the same as mine, you can use what I did as a test to examine your knowledge and prepare your interview in the right direction to boost your offer acceptance rate.
Shopee is among the few top listed companies in Singapore when you think about Data Science. From my perspective, there are three reasons why it is so famous:
I began my career as a mechanical engineer. I decided to shift my career into software development. After I completed the Deep Learning Coursera specialization, I fall in love with Data Science. I worked on a few data science projects for a multinational company. After seeing an opening on LinkedIn, I applied for the data scientist position at Shopee Singapore.
In the first round, you will be interviewed by a Shopee recruiter. In order to determine if I was the right candidate, she reviewed my background and experience in data science. After that, she sent my resume to the hiring managers, who will determine if you are a good fit for the data science team.
Then, I received an offer to go to the next round, which is a programing test conducted online by Glider. I had too little time to prepare for the test and only had time to read through some of LeetCode’s easy questions before taking the test. As a result, my first interview attempt failed.
I learned that I was still lacking in programming fundamentals. To prepare for my next round of applications, I did the following:
As a result of this failed attempt, I have learned that I need to gain a thorough understanding of fundamental programming concepts and practice at least 100 Leetcode questions before my next application for the same role.
A hiring manager accepted my resume and gave me a link to the Glider’s test. With more confidence this time, I managed to finish the test within half the allotted time. Within a day after completing the test, I received an email from the same recruiter inviting me to proceed to the first round of the technical interview.
When I was interviewed, the interviewer asked me about my project experience, and I could tell from his reaction that he was very interested in my projects since they were pretty new to him. To explain them verbally, I spent about 30 minutes. After that, he asked me two Leetcode questions (one easy, one medium) and I was requested to code them in my own preferred editor. The following are my takeaways from this technical interview:
The questions were completed within the time limit (30 minutes for 2 questions). The entire technical interview took about 1 hour to complete.
3 hours after the interview (the Shopee HR team is really efficient), I was informed that I passed the first technical interview and will have my second technical interview three days later.
In my second technical interview, I discussed the technical aspects of my project experience. The interviewer questioned my understanding of what I did for the past project and how I contributed to its success. For example, while explaining my captioning project, he asked me how I evaluate the accuracy of my model. In my reply, I told him I used BLEU for evaluation. Then he went on to ask why I didn’t use Meteor or CiDER for the evaluation as well. I told him, however, that I was familiar with Meteor and CiDER, but I couldn’t recall their algorithms. It could negatively impact his opinion of my knowledge of the subject.
In the end, he seemed a bit confused by my work, but he didn’t want to take too long going over it because he had a number of questions he needed to ask before he finished the one-hour technical interview. Following that, he asked me for my production experience. For example, how I scaled my data science project, what tools I used, and what the general process looked like. As most of my past projects focused on model building, I wasn’t involved in the deployment of the production code. So, I couldn’t respond. At this stage, I was rejected, as you might expect.
I was just one interview away to get my final offer. Thus, my performance in the second technical interview made me pretty upset, but I got up quickly and did an introspection as follows:
Some people may find it difficult to understand why a data scientist needs to learn how to deploy the app. I believe that most companies would expect you to manage the entire data science product pipeline yourself unless you were working in a dedicated team where you’d be given a specific pipeline to focus on. Additionally, knowing how everything works helps us identify any problems along the pipeline quickly. Hence, you should be familiar with the whole data science pipeline if you want to stay competitive.
Approximately six months later, I received a call from a Shopee recruiter inviting me to an interview for the data scientist role. When I received the call, I was quite surprised. I recalled, however, that the recruiter told me after I failed my second interview attempt that my resume would be kept in the system and I will be notified if there were any future vacancies that matched my profile. In other words, if you apply for a job, you should perform well at every interview. Even if you fail the interview, your performance will determine whether you are considered in the future.
On the phone, the recruiter checked my current status and also reviewed similar questions from my previous interview. Fortunately, my resume was accepted by a hiring manager. Having passed six months since the last interview, I was asked to go through the whole process again.
The Glider’s test this time was a bit different. The questions were of medium difficulty. The first question could be found on Leetcode. The second question was, however, a bit tricky. They posed a dynamic programming question as a problem occurring at Shopee. Therefore, the situation felt real, but it was actually comparable to a medium-level question on Leetcode. My advice is that you should not over-memorize the coding questions when you are preparing for the test, but you should ensure that you understand the concepts thoroughly.
After I successfully passed Glider’s test, my next interview was conducted by a data science project lead. Among the questions, he asked me was how I had worked on past projects and why I was interested in Shopee. My last 20 minutes were devoted to a medium-level question on leetcode. Unlike my last interview, where I was asked two Leetcode questions, he decided not to ask the second question due to time constraints. Despite my concerns that this could affect my performance, the interviewer assured me that it would not. Considering that he wanted to evaluate my coding ability, he thought one question would suffice. Fortunately, I was invited to move on to the next round.
As I mentioned previously, I prepared slides to demonstrate my project pipeline. With only 40 minutes to showcase my projects, I selected only two of my favorites. The following questions were asked when I was presenting the projects:
When the interviewer saw my slides, she was very impressed. She asked me why the project pipeline was designed this way and how I resolved edge cases. In preparation for your technical interview, I highly recommend that you look closely at your projects and learn about each and every element involved. It is important to explain why each process is included in the pipeline. As an example, the interviewer asked me what would happen if a vulgar word appears in the prediction, and which part of the process is designed to prevent this from happening.
In the next portion of the interview, she gave me 2 business scenarios pertaining to the Shopee data science team. I was asked to outline how I would solve the problem if I were handling the task. It is certain that every interviewee will have a different set of business problems. For proper preparation, you must know how Shopee works and what type of problem you may encounter at Shopee. Occasionally, I read articles shared by some of the largest e-commerce companies in China, which made it easier for me to answer these questions. Therefore, I knew the way they approached a certain problem and have given some possible solutions to the 2 scenarios. In addition, you must have strong knowledge of this field. Suppose you are applying for NLP data scientist. At the very least, you need to understand how to enhance your training data with different augmentation techniques.
Having completed the second technical interview, the HR department informed me 30 minutes later that I’d successfully passed. In less than an hour, I will have my last interview. (The recruiter arranged 2 interviews for me on the same day. If I passed the second interview, I will be allowed to proceed to the last interview. I really appreciate this kind of arrangement since I don’t have to apply for another one-day leave just to attend the interview.)
As I waited for my last interview, I wondered what kind of questions would be asked. I found an article that discussed how the final interview will go. Generally, the last interview takes place only for formalities. The offer is likely to come your way if you reach this stage. It’s not the case for me, however.
In the final interview, the department head asked for a brief introduction about myself. He then questioned my work experience and skill set. In the second part of the interview, he gave me 2 business problems to solve. They differed from the previous round of interviews in that they were an entirely different set of business problems. However, all business questions were related to Shopee’s daily operations. As I didn’t expect such questions to come up, I was kind of losing my head. Even though I managed to put forward some simple solutions, I wasn’t satisfied with them.
A total of 15 minutes were spent on the interview, which was much shorter than scheduled. As soon as the interview was over, I asked the recruiter to forward a message to the department lead letting him know there were several better solutions than the one offered. Hopefully, this will at least add some value to my performance.
I did not think my performance at my last interview was good enough to land the job. It surprised me that I got the job offer the next day (Again, Shopee HR is incredibly efficient).
When I was preparing for my first technical interview, I searched the web to see if anyone had a chance to share their experiences. As a result, I found this medium post very helpful as it generously shared the entire interview process and the questions he encountered during the interview. Following my search for coding questions, I then compiled the following questions for my preparation:
For students who are studying in their final years and are considering data science careers after graduation, or third-year students looking for an internship in data science, I strongly advise preparing a presentation for your school projects. Ideally, those projects would preferably be data science-related.
It is important to know the workings of an algorithm and how the entire project is put together when you use it. Definitely be prepared to tell the interviewers how you did the experiment and what method you used. What is the constraint of the Naive Bayes algorithm, for example, if you are using it in your project? Sometimes, Data science problems may require you to use neural networks to solve them. If you decided to showcase your knowledge in deep learning, you need to know what the activation functions are and how to differentiate them.
To get the best results, please revisit your fundamentals and understand thoroughly your projects before the interview.
I understand that this article is very lengthy. However, I hope that you will be able to learn from my mistakes and confident enough to prepare for your job interview.
I would appreciate it if you would share this article with your friends and give me a like if you find the material helpful for your job application. Follow me if you’re interested in learning how to build a data science project! I would definitely share more about my data science experience in the next articles.
Please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in applying for the Shopee data scientist role. I would be happy to give you any advice you may need to prepare for your interview and refer you to the position.
Woen Yon is a Data Scientist based in Singapore. His experience includes developing advanced artificial intelligence products for several multinational enterprises.
He loves making friends! Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn and Medium
Common Interview Questions and Answers | Shopee Career Insider
Interviews for Top Jobs at Shopee
Quality Assurance Interview
I interviewed at Shopee
Interview
The process was great because there were a lot of questions that i have to answer. The process was great because there were a lot of questions that i have to answer
- Why we must hire you?
HR Business Partner Interview
I applied online. I interviewed at Shopee
Interview
HR Recruiter was unsure of the roles posted and seem to be reading off the script with the questions. Highly unnatural and conversation was mostly one way with the interviewer asking questions. There were no room for any of my questions.
- Why do you want to join Shopee and how can you add value?
How to land a Shopee Software Engineering Interview?
Shopee is on a hiring spree for over 400 engineers in Singapore and they are very aggressive in their hiring with very competitive salaries. Here are some ways you can score an interview with them!
Here are 7 short actionable steps you can take to increase your chances of getting scouted on LinkedIn or have your resume be accepted during the initial screening!
Example: “I’m most excited about Shopee because of its commitment to providing customers with an excellent shopping experience. I’ve been looking for a job where I can use my customer service skills and help people find exactly what they need online. I think Shopee is the perfect place for me to do just that.”
Shopee is an e-commerce platform that offers customers with a variety of products. As such, it’s important for the company to have someone who can manage these products effectively and efficiently. When you answer this question, make sure to highlight your experience in product management and how it will help you succeed at Shopee.
Example: “I would first define what I mean by sellers/buyers, then create a scoring system for each seller/buyer based on their performance. For example, if they have a high customer satisfaction rating, I will give them a higher score than those with low ratings. If they have a lot of negative reviews, I will lower their scores. This way, I can ensure that only quality sellers are allowed to sell on Shopee.”
Example: “In my previous role as an e-commerce manager for a large company, I was responsible for managing several different projects at once. One day, one of my team members came to me with a problem. They had been working on a project that required them to create a new product page by the end of the week. Unfortunately, they weren’t sure how to complete the task.
Example: “I am familiar with Google Analytics, which I used at my last job. It’s an excellent tool for measuring customer behavior and identifying areas where we can improve our marketing strategies. I also understand Shopee uses BigQuery, which is similar to Google Analytics but more advanced. I would be happy to learn how to use it.”
After two failed attempts, I succeeded. Here are some tips for preparing for your next data science interviews.
The Shopee headquarters. Author by
This article includes the lessons I learned from failing the job interviews at Shopee Singapore. Three interview attempts later, I am starting a new job as a Data Scientist at Shopee Singapore.
You will find the most comprehensive overview of how to apply for a data scientist position at Shopee Singapore. I will mention a number of resources that you may find helpful to prepare for the Data Scientist interview at any company.
Students or non-experienced data scientists will be able to benefit from this article as they prepare for an interview for a data science position at Shopee Singapore. If you are already working as a data scientist, you will learn about what to expect in the interviews, how to prepare for your technical interviews, and how to impress your interviewers.
I have been to many interviews for a data scientist position at Shopee Singapore since 2019. Each failed interview has forced me to identify my weaknesses. To increase my chance of landing an interview, I tried every medium to gather others’ experience and sought out experienced people who could help me prepare. In the first round, getting your resume passed is easy; any error you make in the rest of the interviews could cost you a final offer. In order not to experience the costly failure I had in the past, I want you to avoid it.
While I cannot guarantee that the scenario you will be encountering will be the same as mine, you can use what I did as a test to examine your knowledge and prepare your interview in the right direction to boost your offer acceptance rate.
Without further ado, I will begin by explaining why I applied to Shopee.
Shopee is among the few top listed companies in Singapore when you think about Data Science. From my perspective, there are three reasons why it is so famous:
Source:
FAQ
How do I prepare for a Shopee interview?
- Ask questions that you have regarding the roles and responsibilities, team, culture etc.
- Don’t be shy and ask the recruiter how you can better prepare for the upcoming interviews.
- If you need more time to prepare for the interviews, kindly let the recruiter know!
Why do you want to work here Shopee?
How many rounds of interview are there in Shopee?
What are the 10 most common interview questions and answers for?
- Tell Me About Yourself. …
- Why Are You the Best Person for the Job? …
- Why Do You Want This Job? …
- How Has Your Experience Prepared You for This Role? …
- Why Are You Leaving (or Have Left) Your Job? …
- What Is Your Greatest Strength? …
- What Is Your Greatest Weakness?
