What’s a data scientist gotta do (to work with Fi)?

In part two of our ongoing series on interviewing the interviewers at Fi, we talk to our in-house scientist. And before you ask, no, we don’t have any lab coat-wearing mad scientists here.

We asked our data scientist, Simrat Hanspal , her thoughts on hiring for Fi’s data sciences team. Below are excerpts from the interview.

So tell us, what’s a data scientist gotta do to work with Fi?

Data science is a very vast domain and even with a lot of experience, you cannot cover all aspects of it. There’s always a tremendous learning curve and that requires you to keep evolving and picking up new skills. You have to be a go-getter.

For us, culture fit is a very important thing. I look for candidates who are self-motivated and brilliant at what they do. But most importantly, I look for candidates who have empathy because WE is more important than ME. We are a family after all. And that’s the focus throughout the company as well.

And in this vast domain of data science, how do you assess technical skills?

I try to assess your contribution in your existing or prior role by understanding the business problem and technical details of how you solved it. Did you have or acquire the skills and knowledge needed to solve the problem? Did you understand business technicalities and the impact of your work? Did you cover all edge cases? Did you build an optimised solution? All of this helps in assessing how you solve a problem.

I also pick up a use case that can be very abstract to see how you deal with an ambiguous task. This helps in understanding how you think logically and allows me to assess your nature in an uncomfortable situation.

How do you balance technical expertise with Fi culture fit?

Technical skills are certainly very important in this field, but in terms of culture fit, one brilliant, energetic person could get the entire team even more fired up. So, we look for candidates who tick most boxes on both technical expertise and Fi culture. We’re looking for missing avengers in short ;)

Interested in helping us build Fi ? Check out our open roles here .

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