went through a Workday DS interview loop in Q1 2026 for a mid-level data scientist role on their workforce analytics team. sharing because i found almost nothing specific about their DS process before going in.
OA: same hackerrank setup as SWE but the problems were different. one SQL problem (multi-table join, window function for computing running totals within a partition), one probability question disguised as a word problem, and one python array manipulation. 90 minutes, pretty manageable.
phone screen with tech lead: 30 minutes, mostly talking through my background. one SQL problem on the fly (find the department with the second-highest average salary, standard). they asked me to explain the difference between a left join and a left anti-join and why you'd use each. not a trick, just testing fundamentals.
onsite: 4 rounds for DS specifically.
SQL round: 45 min, complex queries involving employee tenure calculations, cohort retention, and a scenario where i had to find the employees whose manager's team had grown by more than 20% YoY. legitimately hard SQL. i'd say harder than what i hit in phone screens at other companies. CTEs, window functions, nested subqueries, all fair game.
stats / analytics case round: 45 min. given a scenario: Workday's time-tracking feature shows adoption dropping in a customer segment. walk through how you'd analyze it. they wanted: hypothesis generation, metric selection (DAU isn't enough here, you need activation-rate, time-to-first-log, manager-review completion rate etc), what data you'd pull, what confounders you'd control for. very applied.
ML / modeling round: they asked about methods i've used for workforce forecasting specifically. did i know survival analysis, had i worked with hierarchical data. not a coding round, more of a technical discussion. if you have experience with organizational or HR data you'll be more comfortable.
behavioral: same values-based questions as SWE loop (cross-functional, ownership, learning). standard.
comp range i heard was $140k-$180k base for mid-level DS in Pleasanton area, plus bonus and RSUs. offer came with Workday stock which i didn't know much about going in, worth understanding their vesting schedule.