VP-sourced hire: managerial, 2 technical/case-study rounds, comp discussion; 24LPA+8L ESOP offer

Got selected at Zomato for the role of data scientist.
Have worked here for a month, will elaborate on the interview experience.
About Me: from a tier 3 College in Delhi, India. Total YOE - 2 Years, total yoe as a data scientist - 2 Years.
I have 6 months of internship experience from a startup and 2 years of experience from a good service based company.
PS If you're from tier 1 college, you'll only have just one interview round.

Interview Experience

0. Application

I put my status as "open to work" on linkedin and after a week, I got an inmail from the VP of Data Science from Zomato saying that he likes my profile and would like to interview me for the role of data scientist. I replied with a yes.

1. First Round - Managerial (20 mins)

This round was with the same VP, who briefed me about the company culture, the kind ongoing projects and the kind of work they expect.

• Asked me how do I solve a given problem in the scope of data science and cross questioned.
• Asked about the kind of work I have done earlier in my current and previous companies and some cross questioning.

2. Second Round - Technical (1 Hr)

This round was taken by a senior data scientist.

• Asked questions related to CV, like explaining a project end to end.
• Asked questions like, why did you use this approach in your projects not some other approach, multiple times.
• Explain the working of some machine learning algos and methods.
• How do we train a word2vec
• Bagging and boosting.
• Few basic question on statistics.
• How would you go about building an ETA calculation model for Zomato.
• No questions were asked on deep learning.
  I was able to answer most of the questions but gave wrong answers for 2-3 questions. For the case study question, its open ended, they just want to see your approach.

3. Third Round - Technical and Case Study (1 Hr)

This round was taken by a principal data scientist. There were some questions in the previous round of which I didnt give the right answer, so the same questions were asked again in this round, but this time, I gave the right answers.

• Again some common Machine learning concepts questions.
• Asked me 3 data science case study problems: How to design recommender system for zomato, to recommend dishes to a user. How would you solve the cold-start problem. What metric would you choose to figure out how good your solution is performing.

4. Compensation Discussion Round

This round was with the VP, he first gave me the feedback from the 2 rounds. He told me that though my knowledge and problem solving skills are good for them, but the kind of projects I have done wont be of much help. With that said, he offered me - OFFER - 24LPA Fixed and 8Lacs worth of ESOPS vested annually