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Analytical Background Questions

The candidate's approach to analytical, evidence-based problem solving: how they take an ambiguous question, break it into testable pieces, gather and examine relevant information or data, choose appropriate methods to reach a conclusion, and turn that conclusion into a concrete recommendation or decision. This can show up as quantitative work (statistics, data analysis, experimentation, dashboards) or as qualitative and domain-specific analysis (reviewing logs or incidents, case or contract research, market or process analysis, root-cause investigation). Draw on academic projects, internships, or professional work. Focus on the end-to-end path: how the question or hypothesis was framed, what evidence was examined and with what tools or methods, what trade-offs were considered, and how the resulting insight changed a real decision or outcome.

HardSystem Design
72 practiced
Design a streaming solution to compute Daily Active Users (DAU) from event streams that may contain duplicate event emissions and out-of-order arrivals. Requirements: accurate per-user-per-day deduplication, support 15-minute incremental updates, scale to 200M events/day, and reconcile with a daily batch job. Describe algorithms, state management, watermarks, and storage choices.
MediumTechnical
102 practiced
Coding/data-science: Write a Python function that takes two arrays of binary outcomes (control and treatment) and returns a bootstrap 95% confidence interval for the difference in conversion rates. Use numpy; explain your choice of number of resamples and include reproducibility considerations.
MediumTechnical
78 practiced
SQL task: Given `events(event_id, user_id, session_id, event_name, occurred_at)`, write a query to compute funnel conversion rates for steps ['view','add_to_cart','checkout','purchase'] within the same session for a 7-day period. Identify which step has the largest drop-off and return counts and conversion rates per step.
MediumTechnical
65 practiced
You are building a fraud detection model with a positive class prevalence of 0.5%. Describe practical strategies to handle class imbalance at the data level (sampling, synthetic examples), algorithm level (class weights, focal loss), and evaluation level. Discuss trade-offs and which metrics you would monitor in production.
MediumTechnical
57 practiced
Describe methods to detect data drift in production for numeric and categorical features. Include statistical tests (KS test, Cramer V), windowing strategies, thresholds, and how you would prioritize which feature drifts to investigate based on model impact.

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