Newsela is an innovative educational technology company dedicated to transforming the way students engage with the world through reading. It offers an expansive content platform where educators can access engaging, standards-aligned texts that support learning across various subjects. As Newsela continues to grow, it supports millions of students and educators by providing differentiated reading materials that cater to diverse learning needs.

Joining Newsela as a Data Scientist means becoming a pivotal part of its mission to revolutionize education. This role demands expertise in data analysis, machine learning, statistical modeling, and data visualization. Data Scientists at Newsela utilize their analytical skills to derive insights from large datasets, enhance user experience, and ultimately contribute to the company's goal of improving literacy and learning outcomes for all students.

This guide will walk you through the Data Scientist interview process at Newsela, including commonly asked questions and valuable tips to help you prepare.

Submitting Your Application

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

In the case of data scientist roles, take-home assignments regarding model development, data analysis, 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-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 Newsela office. Your technical prowess, including programming, statistical analysis, 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 data scientist role at Newsela.

Quick Tips For Newsela Data Scientist Interviews

A few tips for acing your Newsela interview include:

• Know Your Data Systems: Newsela questions may involve their unique data systems and processes. Be prepared by understanding general data system architectures and common processes, and think about how they might be applied to educational content.
• Emphasize Analytical Skills: Newsela’s interviews assess how well you can extract insights from data. Be ready to demonstrate your proficiency in statistics, probability, and how you have used these skills in past projects.
• Cultural Fit: Newsela highly values a collaborative and innovative team culture. Practice responding to behavioral questions by tying your answers to Newsela’s core values and mission to improve educational content accessibility and quality.

Typically, interviews at Newsela vary by role and team, but commonly Data Scientist interviews follow a fairly standardized process across these question topics.

• What metrics would you use to determine the value of each marketing channel? Given all the different marketing channels and their respective costs at Mode, a company selling B2B analytics dashboards, what metrics would you use to evaluate the value of each marketing channel?

• How would you measure the success of the banner ad strategy? An online media company wants to experiment with adding web banners into the middle of its reading content to monetize web traffic. How would you measure the success of this banner ad strategy?

• How would you analyze the performance of a new feature without A/B testing? As a data scientist at LinkedIn, you are working on a feature that allows job candidates to message hiring managers directly during the interview process. Due to engineering constraints, the company can't A/B test the feature before launching it. How would you analyze the feature's performance?

• How would you measure the health of the Mentions app and attribute engagement increases? Facebook is rolling out a new feature called "Mentions" for celebrities to connect with their fans. How would you measure the health of the Mentions app? Additionally, if a celebrity starts using Mentions and interacts more with fans, how would you attribute the increase to the app versus the celebrity's desire to engage more?

• What would you investigate to diagnose changes in user engagement and email open rates? As a data scientist on the engagement team, a product manager informs you that the weekly active users metric is up 5% but email notification open rates are down 2%. What would you investigate to diagnose what's happening?

• Write a function pick_host to determine the optimal friend to host a party based on location. Given a group of (N) friends represented by a list of dictionaries where each value is a friend's name and their location on a three-dimensional scale ((x, y, z)), write a function pick_host to return the friend that should host the party. The goal is to minimize the total travel distance for the group.

• 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 would you compare the performance of a new delivery time estimate model to the old one? You want to build a new delivery time estimate model for food delivery. How would you determine if the new model predicts delivery times better than the old model?

• How would you evaluate the performance of a new search engine compared to the existing one? You are building a better search engine for Google and want to see if it serves better results than the existing one in production. How would you determine which search engine performed better, and which metrics would you track?

• What are the benefits of dynamic pricing, and how can you estimate supply and demand? Discuss the benefits of dynamic pricing and how you can estimate supply and demand in this context.

• How would you design a machine learning model to classify major health issues based on health features? You work as a machine learning engineer for a health insurance company. Design a machine learning model that, given a set of health features, classifies if an individual will undergo major health issues or not.

• What is an unbiased estimator and can you provide an example for a layman to understand? Explain what an unbiased estimator is in simple terms and provide an easy-to-understand example.

• What are the benefits of dynamic pricing, and how can you estimate supply and demand in this context? Describe the advantages of dynamic pricing and explain how to estimate supply and demand when using this pricing strategy.

• How would you design a machine learning model to predict major health issues? As a machine learning engineer for a health insurance company, design a model that classifies individuals based on health features to predict if they will undergo major health issues.

If you want more insights about the company, check out our main Newsela 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 Newsela’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 Newsela Data Scientist interview 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!