In my humble experience as a data scientist at a big tech company, a big differentiating factor is familiarity with the R or Pydata stack. It's not just its own language and library, it's a more general idiomatic way toward approaching and solving problems from a "software first" perspective.

I sometimes work with people who are formally trained in stats at a much higher level than myself. But with my lesser ability combined with my capability to write production grade Python code using the pydata stack, my code and solutions are more likely to make it in.