Draper is a prominent technology company celebrated for its contributions to engineering and scientific solutions. It focuses on designing and delivering innovative technical strategies across fields such as aerospace, national security, and biotechnology. As a pivotal player in technology and research, Draper continues to shape the future with its cutting-edge advancements.

Joining Draper as a Business Intelligence (BI) specialist is a strategic move for those passionate about harnessing the power of data to drive impactful decisions. The role demands expertise in data analytics, visualization, and the ability to derive actionable insights from complex datasets. In this position, you will work closely with cross-functional teams to optimize performance and support data-driven strategies.

This guide on Interview Query will help you navigate the interview process at Draper. Dive in to discover valuable insights, commonly asked interview questions, and tips to prepare effectively. Let's get started!

Submitting Your Application

The first step is to submit a compelling application that reflects your technical skills and interest in joining Draper as a Business Intelligence professional. Whether you were contacted by a Draper 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 Draper 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 Draper Business Intelligence 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 Draper Business Intelligence role usually is conducted through virtual means, including video conference and screen sharing. Questions in this 1-hour long interview stage may revolve around Draper’s data systems, ETL pipelines, and SQL queries.

In the case of Business Intelligence roles, take-home assignments regarding product metrics, analytics, and data visualization are incorporated. Apart from these, your proficiency against 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-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 Draper 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 Business Intelligence role at Draper.

Quick Tips For Draper Business Intelligence Interviews

• You should plan to brush up on any technical skills and try as many practice interview questions and mock interviews as possible. A few tips for acing your Draper interview include:
• Know Your Draper Products: Draper questions are standardized and rely heavily on situational scenarios with their products. Study Draper’s large breadth of products and understand how you would personally improve or test them.
• Be Data Driven: Draper’s Business Intelligence interviews assess how well you can provide business-driving insights through data. Brush up on your knowledge of statistics and probability, given these questions can be some of the hardest to solve.
• Embody the Spirit: Draper at its core has a collaborative, employee-focused culture that values innovation. Practice responding to behavioral questions with answers that touch on Draper’s core values.

Typically, interviews at Draper vary by role and team, but commonly Business Intelligence interviews follow a fairly standardized process across these question topics.

• Identify all duplicate values in a list of integers. Given a list of integers, identify all the duplicate values in the list. Assume that the list can contain both positive and negative numbers, and the order of the list does not matter. A number is considered a duplicate if it appears more than once in the list. Return a list of the duplicate numbers.

• Select the five most expensive projects by budget to employee count ratio. Write a query to account for duplicate rows in the employee_projects table and select the top five most expensive projects by budget to employee count ratio.

• Create a subquery or common table expression to find the top 3 ads and return join results. Create a subquery or common table expression named top_ads containing the top 3 ads by popularity and return the number of rows resulting from different join operations with the ads table.

• Find employees who joined before their manager. Given two tables, employees and managers, find the names of all employees who joined before their manager.

• Write a function to rotate a matrix by 90 degrees clockwise. Given an array filled with random values, write a function rotate_matrix to rotate the array by 90 degrees in the clockwise direction.

• How do we select the best 10,000 customers for a pre-launch of a new show on Amazon Prime Video? You are working as a data scientist at Amazon Prime Video, and they want to test the launch of a new show on 10,000 customers first. How would you go about selecting the best 10,000 customers for the pre-launch?

• What would the process look like for pre-launching the TV show on Amazon Prime to measure its performance? Describe the steps and metrics you would use to pre-launch a TV show on Amazon Prime and measure its performance.

• How would you evaluate the results of an A/B test on an eCommerce checkout page for free shipping? You ran an A/B test on an eCommerce checkout page to see if surfacing free shipping increases conversions. The control group had no specification of free shipping, while the experiment group did. How would you evaluate the results and determine if the test was successful?

• How would you conduct an experiment to test displaying ETA as a range instead of a direct estimate at Uber? A PM at Uber is considering a new feature to display ETA as a range (e.g., 3-7 minutes) instead of a direct estimate (e.g., 5 minutes). How would you conduct this experiment and determine if the results are significant?

• How would you decide whether Google should build a game feature for Google Home? You are tasked with pitching a new feature for Google Home. A co-worker suggests building a game feature. How would you go about deciding whether Google should build it?

• How would you measure the effectiveness of giving extra pay to delivery drivers during peak hours at a food delivery company? You work at a food delivery company and need to measure the effectiveness of giving extra pay to delivery drivers during peak hours to meet consumer demand. How would you measure this?

• What is the difference between Logistic and Linear Regression? When would you use one instead of the other in practice? Explain the key differences between Logistic and Linear Regression. Describe scenarios where each method is more appropriate to use in practice.

• How would you explain what a p-value is to someone who is not technical? Explain the concept of a p-value in simple terms to someone without a technical background.

• What is the difference between Logistic and Linear Regression? When would you use one instead of the other in practice? Describe the differences between Logistic and Linear Regression and provide examples of scenarios where each would be appropriately used.

If you want more insights about the company, check out our main Draper 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 Draper’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 Draper Business Intelligence 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!