went through the Salesforce DS loop in early 2026 for a role on the Einstein Analytics team. figured i'd write this up since there's almost nothing specific out there.
the process had 5 rounds total:
recruiter screen - 30 min, standard fit questions, they'll ask what attracted you to Salesforce and a bit about your current stack. not technical.
SQL round - 60 min with a DS on the team. two problems. first was a window function question involving retention cohorts. second was a self-join to find pairs of users who performed some action within 24 hours of each other. both were doable at medium difficulty. they're not trying to murder you here, they want to see structured thinking and clean readable queries. practice CTEs, window functions, datetime arithmetic.
case/product sense - this one surprised me. it was framed as a business case but was really product-analytics flavored. they gave me a scenario where a key Salesforce CRM metric dropped 15% week over week and asked me to walk through how i'd investigate. think: decompose the metric, check for data pipeline issues first, segment by product/region/user type, then form hypotheses. i had 40 minutes and they pushed me to go fast.
stats + modeling - interview with a senior DS, went deep on A/B testing. they asked how i'd design an experiment where users aren't randomly distributed (the Salesforce CRM has org-level clustering). so SUTVA violations, cluster-based randomization, how to handle variance in that setting. also one ML conceptual question: explain bias-variance tradeoff in a non-textbook way. i talked through it using a real project.
final behavioral round - with a director. STAR-method questions, especially around influencing without authority and navigating ambiguity. nothing exotic.
overall the loop was well-organized and my recruiter was responsive. took about 3 weeks start to finish. offer-or-no-decision came 5 business days after final.
if i had to name one thing to prepare most: the stats round. the experiment design question was genuinely hard and separated people.