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The Toro Company Interview Questions

The Toro Company Interview Guides

Machine Learning

Booking Regression

Missing Housing Data

Bank Fraud Model

Rebalancing outcome probabilities for a classifier on imbalanced data.

Rebalance Probabilities

Lasso vs Ridge

Statistics

What are the assumptions of linear regression?

Assumptions of Linear Regression

Covariance vs Correlation

Correlation in Regression

What does it mean to "bootstrap" a data set?

Bootstrapping Samples

What are the regression coefficients when regressing Y on X versus X on Y, given Y = X plus normal white noise?

Regress Y on X

Data Structures & Algorithms

Given an integer N, write a function that returns all of the prime numbers up to N

Prime to N

This problem involves identifying duplicate numbers in a list of integers. The function should return a list of the duplicate numbers.

Find Duplicate Numbers in a List

Write a function that tests whether a string of brackets is balanced.

The Brackets Problem

Given a string, write a function to determine if it is palindrome or not.

String Palindromes

Analytics

How would you present the performance of each subscription to an executive?

Analyzing Churn Behavior

Let’s say that you're in charge of an e-commerce D2C business that sells socks. What business health metrics would you care?

D2C Socks e-Commerce

Let's say you work at Facebook and you're analyzing churn on the platform.

Retention Rate Disparity

Describing a real-world data cleaning and organization project

Data Cleaning Experiences

Behavioral

How would you answer when an Interviewer asks why you applied to their company?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us

Describing a data project and its challenges

Hurdles In Data Projects

What do you tell an interviewer when they ask you what your strengths and weaknesses are?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses

When an interviewer asks a question along the lines of:

<ul>
<li>What would your current manager say about you? What constructive criticisms might he give?</li>
<li>What are your three biggest strengths and weaknesses you have identified in yourself?</li>
</ul>

How would you respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses I

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses II

When an interviewer asks you a question along the lines of:

<ul>
<li>Why did you apply to our company?</li>
<li>What are you looking for in your next job?</li>
<li>What makes you a good fit for our company?</li>
</ul>

How should you respond?

When asked 'What are you looking for in your next job?' in an interview, how can you tie the company's employee benefits into your response?

When asked 'What are you looking for in your next job?' in an interview, how can you tie the company's employee benefits into your response?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us I

How can company values be used effectively in an interview when asked 'What makes you a good fit for our company?'

How can company values be used effectively in an interview when asked 'What makes you a good fit for our company?'

Why Do You Want to Work With Us II

When responding to the question 'Why did you apply to our company?' during an interview, what aspect should you highlight?

When responding to the question 'Why did you apply to our company?' during an interview, what aspect should you highlight?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us III

Describe a data project you worked on. What were some of the challenges you faced?

What are the assumptions of linear regression?

Which assumption of the residuals of the standard linear regression model can not be overcome by increasing the sample size?

Regression assumptions

Let’s say that you’re training a classification model.

How would you combat overfitting when building tree-based models?

Let's say that you're training a classification model.   How would you combat overfitting when building tree-based models?

Overfit Avoidance

How would you handle the data preparation for building a machine learning model using imbalanced data?

Addressing imbalanced data in machine learning through carefully prepared techniques.

Data Preparation for Imbalanced Data

Let’s say we’re comparing two machine learning algorithms. In which case would you use a bagging algorithm versus a boosting algorithm? 

Give an example of the tradeoffs between the two.

In machine learning, when would you use a bagging algorithm over a boosting algorithm?

In machine learning, when would you use a bagging algorithm over a boosting algorithm?

Bagging vs. Boosting

Bagging vs Boosting

Given a string, write a function to determine if it is palindrome or not.

Note: A palindrome is a word/string that is read the same way forward as it is backward, e.g. <code>&#39;reviver&#39;</code>, <code>&#39;madam&#39;</code>, <code>&#39;deified&#39;</code> and <code>&#39;civic&#39;</code> are all palindromes, while <code>&#39;tree&#39;</code>, <code>&#39;music&#39;</code> and <code>&#39;person&#39;</code> are not palindromes.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>word1 = &#34;tree&#34;
word2 = &#34;radar&#34;
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def is_palindrome(word1) -&gt; False
def is_palindrome(word2) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

Imagine you are asked to build a machine learning model to decide new loan approvals for a
financial firm. You ask the data department in the company for a subset of data to get started
working on the problem. The data includes different features about applicants such as age,
occupation, zip code, height, number of children, favorite color, etc. You decide to build
multiple machine learning models to test out different ideas before settling on the best one.

How would you explain the bias-variance tradeoff with regards to
building and choosing a model to use?

Bias vs. Variance Tradeoff

How does random forest generate the forest? Additionally, why would we use it over other algorithms such as logistic regression?

What happens when you average the output on multiple decision trees?

What happens when you average the output on multiple decision trees?

Average Trees

Random Forest Explanation

What is the difference between Logistic and Linear Regression?

When would use one instead of the other in practice?

What is the difference between Logistic and Linear Regression?

Linear vs Logistic Regression

Tell me about a project in which you had to clean and organize a large dataset.

What are the key differences between classification models and regression models?

What is the MOST important difference between regression and classification models?

What is the MOST important difference between regression and classification models?

Classification vs Regression

Classification and Regression

Let’s say that you work at a bank that wants to build a model to detect fraud on the platform.

The bank wants to implement a text messaging service in addition that will text customers when the model detects a fraudulent transaction in order for the customer to approve or deny the transaction with a text response.

How would we build this model?

Let’s say that you work at a bank that wants to build a model to detect fraud on the platform.

The bank wants to implement a text messaging service that will text customers when the model detects a fraudulent transaction in order for the customer to approve or deny the transaction with a text response.

Which statement is true?

Let's say that you work at a bank that wants to build a model to detect fraud on the platform.

The bank wants to implement a text messaging service that will text customers when the model detects a fraudulent transaction in order for the customer to approve or deny the transaction with a text response.

Which statement is true?

Given an integer <code>N</code>, write a function that returns a list of all of the prime numbers up to <code>N</code>.

Note: Return an empty list there are no prime numbers less than or equal to <code>N</code>.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>N = 3
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>def prime_numbers(N) -&gt; [2,3]
</code></pre>

What’s the difference between Lasso and Ridge Regression?

Under what circumstances is it recommended to use Lasso regression over Ridge regression?

Under what circumstances is it recommended to use Lasso regression over Ridge regression?

How would you explain the bias variance tradeoff in machine learning to a high school student?

Replaced by QUESTION 791 - Should be deleted

Bias Variance Tradeoff

You’re given a string that may contain the characters <code>{</code>, <code>}</code>, <code>[</code>, <code>]</code>, <code>(</code>, and <code>)</code>.

Task: Verify that the string is balanced. A balanced string is one where every opening character, <code>{</code>, <code>[</code>, or <code>(</code>, has a corresponding closing character, <code>}</code>, <code>]</code>, or <code>)</code>.

Write a function called <code>is_balanced(string: str) -&gt; bool</code> which verifies the balance of a string.

Example:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>is_balanced(&#39;(())[]{}&#39;) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>is_balanced(&#39;{([(){}])()}&#39;) -&gt; True
</code></pre>

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>is_balanced(&#39;{}[]())&#39;) -&gt; False
</code></pre>

<hr/>

How do you detect and handle correlation between variables in linear regression? What will happen if you ignore the correlation in the regression model?

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.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; [1, 2, 3]
</code></pre>

The numbers 1, 2, and 3 all appear more than once in the list, so they are considered duplicates.

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, -1, 2, 3, 3, -1]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; [-1, 3]
</code></pre>

The numbers -1 and 3 both appear more than once in the list, so they are considered duplicates. Note that the order of the output does not matter.

Example 3:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; []
</code></pre>

None of the numbers in the list appear more than once, so there are no duplicates.

We want to build a model to predict housing prices in the city of Seattle. We’ve scraped 100K sold listings over the past three years but found that around 20% of the listings are missing square footage data.

How do we deal with the missing data to construct our model?

We want to build a model to predict housing prices in the city of Seattle. We’ve scraped 100K sold listings over the past three years, but have discovered that around 20% of the listings are missing square footage data.

How would you approach dealing with this missing data, in order to construct the most useful predictive model possible?

We want to build a model to predict housing prices in the city of Seattle. We’ve scraped 100K sold listings over the past three years, but have discovered that around 20% of the listings are missing square footage data.

How would you approach dealing with this missing data, in order to construct the most useful predictive model possible?



Let’s say you work for an e-commerce company. Vendors can send products to the company’s warehouse to be listed on the website. Users are able to order any in-stock products and submit returns for refunds if they’re not satisfied.

The front end of the website includes a vendor portal that provides sales data in daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly intervals.

The company wants to expand worldwide. They put you in charge of designing its end-to-end architecture, so you need to know what significant factors you’ll need to consider. What clarifying questions would you ask?

What kind of end-to-end architecture would you design for this company (both for ETL and reporting)?

How would you design a data warehouse for a e-commerce company looking to expand internationally?

International e-Commerce Warehouse

Let’s say we want to build a model to predict booking prices on Airbnb.

Between linear regression and random forest regression, which model would perform better and why?

What are the two key concepts of random forest regression?

What are the two key concepts of random forest regression?

Let’s say that you’re a data scientist at DoorDash.

How would you build a model to predict which merchants the company should go after for acquisition when entering a new market?

How to model merchant acquisition in a new market?

Merchant Acquisition

Let’s say that you’re in charge of an e-commerce D2C business that sells socks.

What business health metrics would you care about tracking on a company dashboard?

Let’s say you work as a data scientist at DoorDash. 

You are tasked to build a machine learning system that minimizes missing or wrong orders placed on the app.

How would you go about designing this system?

Minimize Wrong Orders

What does it mean to “bootstrap” a data set?

Give an example of a time when it would be appropriate to bootstrap a smaller sample(s) from a larger data set.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?

Let’s say you work at a food delivery company.

How would you measure the effectiveness of giving extra pay to delivery drivers during peak hours to meet the demand from consumers?

Extra Delivery Pay

A/B Testing

Let’s say that you work for a company like Netflix. Netflix has two pricing plans: $15/month or $100/year.

Let’s say an executive at the company wants you to analyze the churn behavior of users that subscribe to either plan.

What kinds of metrics / graphs / models would you build to help give the executive an over-arching view of how the subscriptions are performing?

What is the difference between covariance and correlation? Provide an example.

Challenge

The Toro Company Salaries by Position

Senior Product Manager, R&D Technology - The Toro CompanySponsorship:  Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of a school/employment or any other visa, regardless of expiration date, now or in the future. Who Are We? With roots dating back to 1914, The Toro Company was built on a tradition of quality and caring relationships. Today, the company is a leading worldwide provider of innovative solutions for the outdoor environment, including turf and landscape maintenance, snow and ice management, underground utility construction, rental and specialty construction, and irrigation and outdoor lighting solutions. Through a strong network of professional distributors, dealers, rental stores and retailers in more than 125 countries, we proudly offer a wide range of products across a family of global brands to help golf courses, professional contractors, underground construction professionals, groundskeepers, agricultural growers, rental companies, government and educational institutions, and homeowners – in addition to many leading sports venues and historic sites around the world.Your Opportunity: The Senior Product Manager, R&D Technology supports the business objectives of the Landscape and Contractor Group (L&C) which consists of Toro, Exmark and Spartan lawn mower brands, by guiding the development and leading the integration of key company-wide technologies (autonomous, alternative energy, and connected products) across the L&C fleet of equipment and leading the digital product portfolio strategy.  Key functions include:  creating and refining the technology strategy for L&C product portfolio, leading the development of technology roadmaps for the divisions, identifying and developing the business case for key technology integration driven by unmet customer needs, leading divisional product marketing teams on technology integration across the product portfolio, supporting the development of cross-department processes and procedures to support new technologies, and collaborating with peers company-wide to identify and drive synergies.Work Location:  Candidates have the choice of where their home office base would be:  Bloomington, MN Toro's International Corporate Headquarters;  Beatrice, NE at Exmark's Division Headquarters;   or Batesville, ARK at the Spartan Mowers Division Headquarters. The current team works a hybrid model with 3-days on-site and optional 2-days remote;  or 5-days on campus (varying on the culture of the location).    Other job locations and/or fully remote is not available at this time.This role includes travel 15%-20% (both domestic and international) with related expense reporting duties. What Will You Do?To grow and build a successful career with The Toro Company, you will be responsible for: Develop, present, and execute multi-generational product plan for digital, autonomous, connected, and alternative energy technology in order to accomplish relevant product line, departmental, and divisional objectives.Coordinate and execute voice of the customer activities and other market research required to fully understand future technologies.Participate in specialization groups, product development, and DCI team meetings on a regular basis.Partner with product managers to lead tech-focused product projects through key project stage gates.Assist with the ongoing management and evolution of existing technologies in use across the product portfolio.Plan and deliver technology related sales training, including participation in live training events and recorded webinars.Work closely and collaborate with peer divisions within TTC on developing and executing joint strategies.Coordinate with product managers to create tech-focused content for sales training tools and marketing collateral materials.Monitor competitive environment and develop and contribute data to create competitive technology related comparisons for use in training the L&C and distributor sales teams.Collaborate with product managers, sales team, and finance team regarding digital and related technology pricing strategies.Support industry trade shows, customer experience events, and other key activities.Coach product manager(s), associate product manager(s), marketing associate(s), and/or marketing interns, and provide general oversight for all digital and technology categories managed by team of direct and indirect reports.What Do You Need?To be considered for this role, an individual should meet the following minimal requirements: A minimum of a Bachelor’s degree in marketing or engineering. 12+ years of applicable experience (or MBA with 10+ years applicable experience) in durable goods.Must be willing to obtain/maintain an active and valid US Passport and a non-exprired US Driver's license.trong interpersonal communication abilities and excellent verbal/written communication skills.Strong analytical skills.Customer service and people skills are critical.Experience in creating and executing strategic roadmaps.Experience in creating the vision and strategy to meet key business objectives.Experience in collaborating and leading effectively cross-divisionally on key initiatives.Preferred: An MBA is preferred. Engineering or Technical background is preferred.6+ years’ experience in the outdoor power equipment industry preferred.Product development experience is preferred. Business-to-business experience through a dealer/distribution system is preferred.Prior experience with the L&C ( Landscape & Contractor) dealer channel preferred.Other Job-Related Components: Works closely with marketing directors, product managers, regional sales managers, training team, and marketing communications team.Contribute to long-range and annual plans.Builds strong cross-functional working relationships with Engineering, Sales, Customer Care, IT, and other internal departments.  Collaborate across divisions and with key internal corporate resources.Manage 1-3 direct and/or indirect reports.Serves as an advocate for the customer.Travel Requirement: 15-20%, including some international travel. Must be willing to obtain/maintain an active and valid US Passport and a non-exprired US Driver's license.Occasionally: Exposure to outside weather conditions;   Exposure to wet and/or humid conditions (non-weather);  Exposure to extreme heat or cold (non-weather);  work near moving mechanical parts;  work around fumes, airborne particles, or toxic chemicals. While performing the duties of this job, the noise level in the work environment is usually loud. The employee must  occasionally lift and /or move more than 20 pounds.Specific vision abilities required by this job include Close vision; Distance vision; Color vision; Peripheral vision; Depth perception and ability to adjust focusWhat Can We Give You?At The Toro Company, we are always working to make sure our employees know just how valued they are. In addition to a competitive salary, an affordable and top-tier medical/dental/vision plan, 401k, and many other great benefits - The Toro company offers employees at our Bloomington, MN HQ location a variety of perks, including: Dress for your day - We know you're more productive when you're comfortable, which is why TTC employees are encouraged to take advantage of our casual, corporate environment. Food- Take advantage of our onsite café, which serves both breakfast and lunch. With a Caribou Coffee attached, you can grab a snack and a coffee at any time during your day. Wellness - The Toro Company’s HQ offers complimentary use of our onsite fitness facility to employees. In addition to physical well-being, TTC offers a variety of mental health and financial health resources to all employees.  Volunteerism - The Toro Company is proud to provide employees 20 hours of paid time to volunteer in the community. Summer Hours – Enjoy a flexible schedule during the summer! By working a little more during the first few days of the week, TTC employees at our Bloomington HQ are able to start their weekends early and leave by noon on Friday. Competitive Salary– A reasonable pay range for this opportunity is $145,500 - $195,100.  The pay range takes into account skills, experience, education, and location. It is not common to be hired at or near the top of the range; compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. Cash compensation is one piece of our competitive total rewards package. If you need to, you can access your pay early with the One@Work app, formerly the Even app. At The Toro Company, we are committed to fostering a secure and trustworthy recruitment process for our applicants. Recruitment fraud is a potential threat to job seekers, so please be aware that throughout our recruitment process, you’ll never be required to pay any fees or disclose personal financial details when applying to TTC opportunities.   The Toro Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants based on merit and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), parental status, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, military service, or other non-merit factors. We are committed to creating a welcoming environment for all employees.#LI-Onsite  SummaryLocation: Bloomington, MN; Batesville, AR; Beatrice, NEType: Full time

Calculate Moving Average	SQL	Easy
Predict Customer Churn	Machine Learning	Medium
A/B Test Significance	Statistics	Medium
Optimize Query Performance	SQL	Hard
Feature Importance Analysis	Machine Learning	Medium
Clean Missing Data	Python	Easy
Neural Network Architecture	Deep Learning	Hard
Calculate Cohort Retention	SQL	Medium
Bayesian Probability	Statistics	Easy
Recommend Similar Products	Machine Learning	Hard

The Toro Company Interview Questions

The Toro Company Interview Guides