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Mixpanel Interview Questions

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Let’s say we have a table with an <code>id</code> and <code>name</code> fields. The table holds over 100 million rows and we want to sample a random row in the table without throttling the database.

Write a query to randomly sample a row from this table.

Input:

<code>big_table</code> table

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Columns</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Write a query to randomly sample a row from a big table.

Random SQL Sample

You are testing hundreds of hypotheses with many t-tests. What considerations should be made?

What is a key disadvantage of the F-test when compared to multiple t-tests?

What is a key disadvantage of the F-test when compared to multiple t-tests?

Hundreds of Hypotheses

You are testing hundreds of hypotheses with many t-tests. What considerations should be made?

Let’s say that your company is running a standard control and variant AB test on a feature to increase conversion rates on the landing page. The PM checks the results and finds a .04 p-value.

How would you assess the validity of the result?

Experiment Validity

Mixpanel Salaries by Position

About Mixpanel Mixpanel is an event analytics platform for builders who need answers from their data at their fingertips-no SQL required. When everyone in the organization can see and learn from the impact of their work on product, marketing, and company revenue metrics, they are poised to make better decisions. Over 9,000 paid customers, including companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Sweetgreen, Samsara, and Uber, use Mixpanel to understand their customers and measure progress. Our commitment is to provide the most comprehensive and reliable analytics platform accessible and trusted by all. We are actively recruiting for multiple Software Engineers across different levels for our org! About the Role Mixpanel is powered by a custom distributed database. This system ingests more than 1 Trillion user-generated events every month while ensuring end-to-end latencies of under a minute and queries typically scan more than 1 Quadrillion events over the span of a month. Over the last year, our inbound traffic has doubled. As our existing customers grow in volume and we add new ones, we expect this growth in traffic to continue. The Distributed Systems engineering teams are responsible for adding new capabilities and ensuring the smooth operation of the underlying systems. Responsibilities Mixpanel's infrastructure runs on Google Cloud Platform. We rely on Kubernetes and Docker for orchestration and containerization of our services. We primarily use Golang for writing services and all internal communication happens via GRPC. We use a combination of C and C++ wherever Golang doesn't meet our performance goals. As an engineer on the Distributed Systems teams, you'll be responsible for: <ul><li>Working with other engineers to build distributed systems that can handle data at scale</li><li>Debugging production issues across multiple services and all levels of our infrastructure stack</li><li>Ensuring reliability and uptime of the services you're responsible for</li><li>Keeping an eye on how much your service costs every month and removing inefficiencies wherever possible</li><li>Improving engineering standards and holding a high bar for code quality and simplicity</li><li>Pushing the boundaries on how our customers analyze their product data</li></ul> A typical project requires a thorough understanding of how not just your service works but also how it interacts with other components. Here are some projects we've worked on in the past to give you an idea of what to expect. <ul><li>Most of the systems in our stack provide at least once semantics. As a result, we risk duplicating events that flow through them. To overcome this limitation, we added support for event deduplication that can work at our scale. Typical approaches for deduplication don't perform well on large amounts of data, so we had to do something highly custom for our stack. We wrote about this on our engineering blog here.</li><li>Back in 2019, we migrated our ingestion API service from Python to Golang for better performance and type safety. We had to do this while ensuring that both systems handle data the same way. Because we had to compare, both, HTTP responses and transformed payloads, nothing out of the box worked for us. This blog post talks about how we did the actual migration without any customer visible downtime.</li><li>In 2021, as our traffic grew almost 100%, the cost of storing data became untenable. Our engineers worked on an incremental way to eventually realize almost $30000 in savings per month.</li></ul> If projects like the ones listed above excite you, the Distributed Systems engineering team will be a great fit. We're Looking For Someone Who Has We have openings across multiple distributed systems teams. We're looking for engineers who have: <ul><li>A strong grasp of computer science fundamentals when it comes to dealing with distributed systems and networks. You'll routinely run into issues where "one in a million" chances actually happen in production</li><li>A knack for problem-solving and thinking from first principles. You don't shy away from any problem, no matter the scale or impact</li><li>A bias towards shipping early and iterating. We believe in making small incremental changes to existing systems instead of large multi-quarter undertakings</li><li>Experience building distributed systems or is eager to build that skillset</li></ul> Additional Resources <ul><li>Engineering Life Page </li><li>Tracking events at millisecond granularity</li><li>Ensuring Data Consistency Across Replicas</li><li>Saving $30000 a month by improving Garbage Collection</li><li>Strategies For Effective Data Compaction</li><li>Monitoring Apache Kafka with JMX Exporter and Kafka Exporter</li><li>Resharding petabytes of data to improve performance for our largest customers</li></ul> #LI-JY1 Compensation The total target cash compensation (TTCC) for this full-time position would fall within the bands below. This amount includes base compensation and variable compensation in the form of either a company bonus or commissions. Variable compensation type is determined by your role and level. In addition to the cash compensation provided below, this position is also eligible for equity consideration and other benefits including medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage. You can view our benefits offerings here. Leveling is determined by factors such as years of relevant work experience, level of responsibility, and knowledge required to be successful in the role. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level and are benchmarked to the SF Bay Area Technology data cut released by Radford, a global compensation database. The range displayed represents the minimum and maximum TTCC for new hire salaries for the position across all of our US locations. To stay on top of market conditions, we refresh our salary ranges twice a year so these ranges may change in the future. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, job-related skills, qualifications, and other factors. If you have questions about the specific range, your recruiter can share this information. Senior Software Engineer, IC4 $227,000-$277,000 USD Staff Software Engineer, IC5 $260,000-$352,000 USD Benefits and Perks <ul><li>Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care</li><li>Mental Wellness Benefit</li><li>Generous Vacation Policy & Additional Company Holidays</li><li>Enhanced Parental Leave</li><li>Volunteer Time Off</li><li>Additional US Benefits: Pre-Tax Benefits including 401(K), Wellness Benefit, Holiday Break</li></ul> *please note that benefits and perks for contract positions will vary* Culture Values <ul><li>Be Open: When knowledge becomes open, we can come together as a team to collaborate around a shared purpose</li><li>Customer Focus: Our customers' success is our success</li><li>Lead Change: Everyone at Mixpanel has the capacity to make an impact on the business</li><li>Results Oriented: Driving results in a measurable way ensures we stay focused on the highest impact initiatives</li><li>One Team: We can't win without each other</li></ul> Why choose Mixpanel? We're a leader in analytics with over 9,000 customers and $277M raised from prominent investors: like Andreessen-Horowitz, Sequoia, YC, and, most recently, Bain Capital. Mixpanel's pioneering event-based data analytics platform offers a powerful yet simple solution for companies to understand user behaviors and easily track overarching company success metrics. Our accomplished teams continuously facilitate our expansion by tackling the ever-evolving challenges tied to scaling, reliability, design, and service. Choosing to work at Mixpanel means you'll be helping the world's most innovative companies learn from their data so they can make better decisions. Mixpanel is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity. At Mixpanel, we are focused on things that really matter-our people, our customers, our partners-out of a recognition that those relationships are the most valuable assets we have. We actively encourage women, people with disabilities, veterans, underrepresented minorities, and LGBTQ+ people to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance or other similar laws that may be applicable, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We've immersed ourselves in our Culture and Values as our guiding principles for the impact we want to have and the future we are building.

About Mixpanel Mixpanel is an event analytics platform for builders who need answers from their data at their fingertips-no SQL required. When everyone in the organization can see and learn from the impact of their work on product, marketing, and company revenue metrics, they are poised to make better decisions. Over 9,000 paid customers, including companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Sweetgreen, Samsara, and Uber, use Mixpanel to understand their customers and measure progress. Our commitment is to provide the most comprehensive and reliable analytics platform accessible and trusted by all. About the Team Mixpanel Engineering is a small team that works quickly, prioritizing getting value to customers and iterating to make those experiences even better. We offer the most powerful product analytics tool while still focusing on making the user experience delightful. Engineers have the freedom to move about the stack to deliver value to customers without being blocked by ownership silos. Innovating product capabilities is critical for the growth of our business, and the responsibility of that lies primarily with the product engineering teams. The enterprise team's mission is to grow adoption of our product within existing customer accounts. We listen to our users and build based on their perspectives. We move quickly and diligently. We are passionate about pairing and unifying customers with technology. We recently launched Session Replay: https://mixpanel.com/blog/session-replay-qualitative-insights-mixpanel/ <ul> <li>Product engineering teams at Mixpanel work very closely with Product Managers and Designers in autonomous pods working on strategic goals. </li><li>Teams have access to all the information that's needed to make good decisions - customer support tickets, feature requests, business health data, design docs, and so on. </li><li>We start from customer problems, think from the basics and always challenge the status quo. We like to come up with simple solutions for complex problems. We don't like over-engineering. </li><li>The responsibility of execution, quality control and operations all lies with the engineering team, we don't have project managers, quality engineers or site reliability engineers. </li><li>We prefer docs, Mixpanel dashboards and demos over slide decks. </li><li>We use Slack, Github, Mixpanel, Notion, Figma and Zoom to share our ideas and communicate (in the open, as much as possible). </li><li>Our engineers, designers and product managers work from various cities across North America with clusters in San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Austin. </li></ul>Responsibilities <ul> <li>Start managing one team and may manage more in the future (must be excited to manage individual contributors) </li><li>Team building, performance management and culture: You'll be responsible for hiring, growing and retaining talent via motivation, mentorship and coaching. You'll be responsible for building an inclusive culture on your team where creativity thrives and Mixpanel's cultural values (Customer Focus, Lead Change, One Team, Results Oriented, Be Open) are rewarded. While doing that, you'll also be helping shape the culture of the broader engineering org. </li><li>Strategy, alignment and execution: You'll be partnering with Product Management, Design and Engineering leads to come up with a strategy and roadmap for your team. You'll be responsible for clearly communicating the strategy to your team, keeping the team aligned and focused. You'll be responsible for enabling the team to build high quality products with speed, learn as they ship, and iterate. </li><li>Technical decisions. For Staff/Principal TLM role, you will be expected to be more hands on in technical decision making (for example, you will do code reviews and be on the on-call rotation of your team). For Sr. Manager or Director roles, you may not be hands on, but you will still need to have a deep enough understanding of the inner workings and operations to enable the team and tech leads to make good investment and prioritization decisions. </li></ul>Requirements We would like to see experiences that will enable you to ramp up quickly at Mixpanel and do the things listed above with proficiency. Typically, for product engineering managers, this includes: <ul> <li>Prior experience designing, building and operating a web application. </li><li>Prior experience as a technical lead of an engineering team that worked closely with designers on UX problems. </li><li>Experience making technical decisions and tradeoffs for your team, and understanding of lessons learnt from them </li><li>Instances where you, either as tech lead or manager, displayed leadership by aligning, motivating, or growing the team. </li><li>For Senior Manager role, prior people management experience is necessary. </li><li>For Director role, experience managing managers is necessary. </li></ul>Additional Resources <ul> <li>Engineering Life Page </li> <li>Engineering Blog </li></ul>Compensation The amount listed below is the total target cash compensation (TTCC) and includes base compensation and variable compensation in the form of either a company bonus or commissions. Variable compensation type is determined by your role and level. In addition to the cash compensation provided, this position is also eligible for equity consideration and other benefits including medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage. You can view our benefits offerings here. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level and are benchmarked to the SF Bay Area Technology data cut released by Radford, a global compensation database. The range displayed represents the minimum and maximum TTCC for new hire salaries for the position across all of our US locations. To stay on top of market conditions, we refresh our salary ranges twice a year so these ranges may change in the future. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, job-related skills, qualifications, and other factors. If you have questions about the specific range, your recruiter can share this information. Mixpanel Compensation Range $268,000-$363,000 USD Benefits and Perks <ul> <li>Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care </li><li>Mental Wellness Benefit </li><li>Generous Vacation Policy & Additional Company Holidays </li><li>Enhanced Parental Leave </li><li>Volunteer Time Off </li><li>Additional US Benefits: Pre-Tax Benefits including 401(K), Wellness Benefit, Holiday Break </li></ul>*please note that benefits and perks for contract positions will vary* Culture Values <ul> <li>Be Open: When knowledge becomes open, we can come together as a team to collaborate around a shared purpose </li><li>Customer Focus: Our customers' success is our success </li><li>Lead Change: Everyone at Mixpanel has the capacity to make an impact on the business </li><li>Results Oriented: Driving results in a measurable way ensures we stay focused on the highest impact initiatives </li><li>One Team: We can't win without each other </li></ul> Why choose Mixpanel? We're a leader in analytics with over 9,000 customers and $277M raised from prominent investors: like Andreessen-Horowitz, Sequoia, YC, and, most recently, Bain Capital. Mixpanel's pioneering event-based data analytics platform offers a powerful yet simple solution for companies to understand user behaviors and easily track overarching company success metrics. Our accomplished teams continuously facilitate our expansion by tackling the ever-evolving challenges tied to scaling, reliability, design, and service. Choosing to work at Mixpanel means you'll be helping the world's most innovative companies learn from their data so they can make better decisions. Mixpanel is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity. At Mixpanel, we are focused on things that really matter-our people, our customers, our partners-out of a recognition that those relationships are the most valuable assets we have. We actively encourage women, people with disabilities, veterans, underrepresented minorities, and LGBTQ+ people to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance or other similar laws that may be applicable, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We've immersed ourselves in our Culture and Values as our guiding principles for the impact we want to have and the future we are building.

About Mixpanel Mixpanel is an event analytics platform for builders who need answers from their data at their fingertips-no SQL required. When everyone in the organization can see and learn from the impact of their work on product, marketing, and company revenue metrics, they are poised to make better decisions. Over 9,000 paid customers, including companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Sweetgreen, Samsara, and Uber, use Mixpanel to understand their customers and measure progress. Our commitment is to provide the most comprehensive and reliable analytics platform accessible and trusted by all. We are actively recruiting for multiple Software Engineers across different levels for our org! About the Team Mixpanel Engineering is a small team that works quickly, prioritizing getting value to customers and iterating to make those experiences even better. We offer the most powerful product analytics tool while still focusing on making the user experience delightful. Engineers have the freedom to move about the stack to deliver value to customers without being blocked by ownership silos. The enterprise team's mission is to grow adoption of our product within existing customer accounts. We listen to our users and build based on their perspectives. We move quickly and diligently. We are passionate about pairing and unifying customers with technology. About the Role We recently launched Session Replay: https://mixpanel.com/blog/session-replay-qualitative-insights-mixpanel/ We need a senior software engineer to own our SDK suite and define its future. This individual must gain a deep understanding of the entire team's mission and create a complimentary vision for our SDKs. The success of new product launches will in part be based on our SDK success. In the medium to long term this individual will be expected to work across our SDK and web application. Responsibilities <ul><li>Lead and execute on high impact high visibility projects that span SDK and product</li><li>Gain deep understanding of our SDK components that we ship to our customers</li><li>Work closely and build strong relationships with cross functional partners and implement solutions based on user needs</li><li>Lead and contribute to observability and reliability of all service areas for the team</li></ul> We're Looking For Someone Who Has <ul><li>Proficient in native iOS and/or Android development </li><li>Familiar with latest mobile technology and best practices, examples including Swift, Objective-C, Xcode, Java, Kotlin, Android Studio, React Native, Flutter, etc</li><li>SDKs</li><li>Self starters who take the initiative to solve problems and do so with speed, accuracy, and transparency - experts in bringing clarity to ambiguity</li><li>Individuals who have experience owning large, crucial surface areas of a business and a passion for putting on your Product hat and ensuring those areas are always being improved upon</li><li>Strong written and verbal communicators and leaders who can partner closely with cross functional partners to problem solve and work collaboratively to find the best solution to user experiences</li></ul> Additional Resources <ul><li>Engineering Life Page </li><li>Mixpanel Engineering Blog </li></ul> Compensation The total target cash compensation (TTCC) for this full-time position would fall within the bands below. This amount includes base compensation and variable compensation in the form of either a company bonus or commissions. Variable compensation type is determined by your role and level. In addition to the cash compensation provided below, this position is also eligible for equity consideration and other benefits including medical, vision, and dental insurance coverage. You can view our benefits offerings here. Leveling is determined by factors such as years of relevant work experience, level of responsibility, and knowledge required to be successful in the role. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level and are benchmarked to the SF Bay Area Technology data cut released by Radford, a global compensation database. The range displayed represents the minimum and maximum TTCC for new hire salaries for the position across all of our US locations. To stay on top of market conditions, we refresh our salary ranges twice a year so these ranges may change in the future. Within the range, individual pay is determined by experience, job-related skills, qualifications, and other factors. If you have questions about the specific range, your recruiter can share this information. Senior Software Engineer, IC4 $227,000-$277,000 USD Staff Software Engineer, IC5 $260,000-$352,000 USD Benefits and Perks <ul><li>Comprehensive Medical, Vision, and Dental Care</li><li>Mental Wellness Benefit</li><li>Generous Vacation Policy & Additional Company Holidays</li><li>Enhanced Parental Leave</li><li>Volunteer Time Off</li><li>Additional US Benefits: Pre-Tax Benefits including 401(K), Wellness Benefit, Holiday Break</li></ul> *please note that benefits and perks for contract positions will vary* Culture Values <ul><li>Be Open: When knowledge becomes open, we can come together as a team to collaborate around a shared purpose</li><li>Customer Focus: Our customers' success is our success</li><li>Lead Change: Everyone at Mixpanel has the capacity to make an impact on the business</li><li>Results Oriented: Driving results in a measurable way ensures we stay focused on the highest impact initiatives</li><li>One Team: We can't win without each other</li></ul> Why choose Mixpanel? We're a leader in analytics with over 9,000 customers and $277M raised from prominent investors: like Andreessen-Horowitz, Sequoia, YC, and, most recently, Bain Capital. Mixpanel's pioneering event-based data analytics platform offers a powerful yet simple solution for companies to understand user behaviors and easily track overarching company success metrics. Our accomplished teams continuously facilitate our expansion by tackling the ever-evolving challenges tied to scaling, reliability, design, and service. Choosing to work at Mixpanel means you'll be helping the world's most innovative companies learn from their data so they can make better decisions. Mixpanel is an equal opportunity employer supporting workforce diversity. At Mixpanel, we are focused on things that really matter-our people, our customers, our partners-out of a recognition that those relationships are the most valuable assets we have. We actively encourage women, people with disabilities, veterans, underrepresented minorities, and LGBTQ+ people to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance or other similar laws that may be applicable, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We've immersed ourselves in our Culture and Values as our guiding principles for the impact we want to have and the future we are building.

Mixpanel Interview Questions

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Mixpanel Interview Questions

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