Babel Street illuminates identity and information for a safer, more productive world. Utilizing AI-powered products, Babel Street transforms data into actionable insights, building complete pictures around identity and discovering digital evidence. Their advanced data analytics platform serves highly-regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, legal, law enforcement, and the global public sector.

As a Software Engineer at Babel Street, you will contribute to the development of the Rosette platform, focusing on natural language processing and text analytics. You'll design, build, and maintain key software components, integrate new technologies, and influence architectural decisions. Ideal candidates should have a Bachelor's degree in a technical field, proficiency in Java, and a passion for creating innovative applications.

Interview Query is here to help you navigate the interview process, offering you valuable insights, practice questions, and tips to secure a role at this dynamic company.

Submitting Your Application

The first step is to submit a compelling application that reflects your technical skills and interest in joining Babel Street as a Software Engineer. Whether you were contacted by a Babel Street recruiter or have taken the initiative yourself, carefully review the job description and tailor your CV according to the prerequisites.

Tailoring your CV may include identifying specific keywords that the hiring manager might use to filter resumes and crafting a targeted cover letter. Furthermore, don’t forget to highlight relevant skills and mention your work experiences.

Recruiter/Hiring Manager Call Screening

If your CV happens to be among the shortlisted few, a recruiter from the Babel Street Talent Acquisition Team will make contact and verify key details like your experiences and skill level. Behavioral questions may also be a part of the screening process.

In some cases, the Babel Street hiring manager stays present during the screening round to answer your queries about the role and the company itself. They may also indulge in surface-level technical and behavioral discussions.

The whole recruiter call should take about 30 minutes.

Technical Virtual Interview

Successfully navigating the recruiter round will present you with an invitation for the technical screening round. Technical screening for the Babel Street Software Engineer role is usually conducted through virtual means, including video conference and screen sharing. Questions in this 1-hour long interview stage may revolve around Babel Street’s data systems, ETL pipelines, and SQL queries.

In the case of software engineer roles, take-home assignments regarding product metrics, analytics, and data visualization are incorporated. Apart from these, your proficiency in hypothesis testing, probability distributions, and machine learning fundamentals may also be assessed during the round.

Depending on the seniority of the position, case studies and similar real-world scenario problems may also be assigned.

Onsite Interview Rounds

Followed by a second recruiter call outlining the next stage, you’ll be invited to attend the onsite interview loop. Multiple interview rounds, varying with the role, will be conducted during your day at the Babel Street office. Your technical prowess, including programming and ML modeling capabilities, will be evaluated against the finalized candidates throughout these interviews.

If you were assigned take-home exercises, a presentation round may also await you during the onsite interview for the software engineer role at Babel Street.

Quick Tips For Babel Street Software Engineer Interviews

• Be Familiar with Babel Street’s Core Products: Babel Street relies heavily on its AI-powered data analytics and intelligence platform. Understand the company’s products and how they transform data into knowledge.
• Technical Readiness: Brush up on Java, computational linguistics, NLP, and data science as these are critical skills for the role. Practice as many interview questions and mock interviews on Interview Query as possible.
• Showcase Your Experience: Highlight your experiences with new technologies, agile methodologies, and your ability to influence design and architectural decisions. This is crucial as Babel Street values innovative and collaborative team members.

Typically, interviews at Babel Street vary by role and team, but commonly Software Engineer interviews follow a fairly standardized process across these question topics.

• Write a SQL query to select the 2nd highest salary in the engineering department. Write a SQL query to select the 2nd highest salary in the engineering department. If more than one person shares the highest salary, the query should select the next highest salary.

• Write a function to merge two sorted lists into one sorted list. Given two sorted lists, write a function to merge them into one sorted list. Bonus: What's the time complexity?

• Create a function missing_number to find the missing number in an array. You have an array of integers, nums of length n spanning 0 to n with one missing. Write a function missing_number that returns the missing number in the array. Complexity of (O(n)) required.

• Develop a function precision_recall to calculate precision and recall metrics from a 2-D matrix. Given a 2-D matrix P of predicted values and actual values, write a function precision_recall to calculate precision and recall metrics. Return the ordered pair (precision, recall).

• Write a function to search for a target value in a rotated sorted array. Suppose an array sorted in ascending order is rotated at some pivot unknown to you beforehand. You are given a target value to search. If the value is in the array, then return its index; otherwise, return -1. Bonus: Your algorithm's runtime complexity should be in the order of (O(\log n)).

• Would you suspect anything unusual about the A/B test results with 20 variants? Your manager ran an A/B test with 20 different variants and found one significant result. Would you consider this result suspicious?

• How would you set up an A/B test to optimize button color and position for higher click-through rates? A team wants to A/B test changes in a sign-up funnel, such as changing a button from red to blue and/or moving it from the top to the bottom of the page. How would you design this test?

• What steps would you take if friend requests on Facebook are down 10%? A product manager at Facebook reports a 10% decrease in friend requests. What actions would you take to investigate and address this issue?

• Why might job applications be decreasing while job postings remain constant? You observe that the number of job postings per day has remained stable, but the number of applicants has been decreasing. What could be causing this trend?

• What are the drawbacks of the given student test score datasets, and how would you reformat them for better analysis? You have data on student test scores in two different layouts. What are the drawbacks of these formats, and what changes would you make to improve their usefulness for analysis? Additionally, describe common issues in "messy" datasets.

• Is this a fair coin? You flip a coin 10 times, and it comes up tails 8 times and heads twice. Determine if the coin is fair based on this outcome.

• Write a function to calculate sample variance from a list of integers. Create a function that outputs the sample variance given a list of integers. Round the result to 2 decimal places. Example: Input: test_list = [6, 7, 3, 9, 10, 15] Output: get_variance(test_list) -> 13.89

• Is there anything fishy about the A/B test results with 20 variants? Your manager ran an A/B test with 20 different variants and found one significant result. Evaluate if there is anything suspicious about these results.

• Write a function to return the median value of a list in O(1) time and space. Given a list of sorted integers where more than 50% of the list is the same repeating integer, write a function to return the median value in O(1) computational time and space. Example: Input: li = [1,2,2] Output: median(li) -> 2

• What are the drawbacks of the given student test score data layouts? You have data on student test scores in two different layouts. Identify the drawbacks of these layouts, suggest formatting changes for better analysis, and describe common problems in "messy" datasets.

• How would you evaluate the suitability and performance of a decision tree model for predicting loan repayment? You are tasked with building a decision tree model to predict if a borrower will repay a personal loan. How would you evaluate whether a decision tree is the correct model for this problem? If you proceed with the decision tree, how would you evaluate its performance before and after deployment?

• How does random forest generate the forest and why use it over logistic regression? Explain how a random forest generates its forest of decision trees. Additionally, discuss why you might choose random forest over other algorithms like logistic regression.

• When would you use a bagging algorithm versus a boosting algorithm? You are comparing two machine learning algorithms. In which scenarios would you use a bagging algorithm versus a boosting algorithm? Provide examples of the tradeoffs between the two.

• How would you justify using a neural network model and explain its predictions to non-technical stakeholders? Your manager asks you to build a neural network model to solve a business problem. How would you justify the complexity of this model and explain its predictions to non-technical stakeholders?

• What metrics would you use to track the accuracy and validity of a spam classifier? You are tasked with building a spam classifier for emails and have completed a V1 of the model. What metrics would you use to track the accuracy and validity of the model?

Joining Babel Street as a Software Engineer offers a unique opportunity to engage with cutting-edge technology in AI-powered data analytics and natural language processing. You'll contribute to mission-critical applications that transform vast amounts of multilingual data into actionable insights, working alongside talented professionals dedicated to making the world a safer and more productive place. With responsibilities ranging from building key platform components to integrating new technologies, your work will directly impact industries such as financial services, healthcare, and law enforcement. At Babel Street, a robust benefits package and a commitment to diversity and inclusion further enrich the employee experience.

If you want more insights about the company, check out our main Babel Street Interview Guide, where we have covered many interview questions that could be asked. We’ve also created interview guides for other roles, such as software engineer and data analyst, where you can learn more about Babel Street’s interview process for different positions.

At Interview Query, we empower you to unlock your interview prowess with a comprehensive toolkit, equipping you with the knowledge, confidence, and strategic guidance to conquer every Babel Street interview question and challenge.

You can check out all our company interview guides for better preparation, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Good luck with your interview!