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Enlitic Data Scientist Interview Questions & Guide 2026

Data scientist interview prep for Enlitic: original practice on experiment design, SQL and metric reasoning, with worked solutions.

The 60-second brief

As a Data Scientist at Enlitic, you occupy a pivotal role in harnessing the power of data to drive advancements in the field of medical imaging and diagnostics. This position is essential for developing algorithms that enhance the accuracy and efficiency of clinical decision-making processes, ultimately improving patient outcomes. Your work will directly influence the design of innovative solutions that help healthcare professionals interpret complex imaging data.

Coding rounds for this role are usually data-manipulation shaped rather than data-structure shaped: group-bys, joins, time windows, ranking within a partition. Confirm the format before spending a week on graph traversal.

Focus areas

  • Build member-month denominators from overlapping coverage spans
  • Minimise protected health information in every extract
  • Reconstruct drug exposure intervals from dispensing records

Overview

In this role, you will engage with large datasets, applying statistical methods and machine learning techniques to extract valuable insights. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including engineering, product management, and clinical experts, to ensure that the solutions you create are not only technically robust but also aligned with the needs of users. Expect to work on challenging problems that require both analytical rigor and creativity, as you contribute to products that have a meaningful impact on healthcare delivery.

The Enlitic interview process

Enlitic candidates report 3 rounds · ≈ 3-5 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

Phone Screen

A screening call is a matching exercise run by someone who will not evaluate your statistics. They are checking that the work described on your resume is work you personally did, and that its scope matches the level the role is written for. Logistics get settled in the same half hour so nobody spends an interviewer's afternoon on a mismatch. The answer that fails is the one narrated in the plural. If every sentence is 'we built' and 'the team decided', there is nothing specific to write down about you. Name the piece that was yours, the decision you made inside it, and what changed after.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether the ownership implied by your resume survives one round of follow-up about who actually did which part
  • Whether your described scope (data size, stakeholders, what shipped) matches the seniority the role is written at
  • Whether timeline, location and compensation expectations make the rest of the loop worth scheduling

How to prepare

  • Rewrite your top three resume bullets in the first person singular, each with the decision you made and what moved afterwards, then say them out loud once so the 'we' does not return under pressure
  • Attach one number to each project: the baseline, the change, and the window it was measured over. Where impact was never measured, say that plainly rather than inventing a figure
  • Settle your compensation range before the call and give it as a range with a reason behind it, such as current total comp or a competing timeline, instead of deflecting the question twice

Technical Interviews

Much of what gets scored here happens out loud while you type. Nobody can see your reasoning inside a half-written query, so five silent minutes read as being stuck even when they are not. State the plan in plain language first: which tables, what grain you are aggregating to, and the one filter that defines the population. Then write it. The narration doubles as insurance, because a wrong plan gets caught early and cheaply while a wrong query gets caught at the end with no time left to redo it. A timed statistics section, where one exists, is a separate test with its own clock.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether the query you write matches the plan you just described
  • What you do with a hint, meaning whether the correction gets absorbed or the first approach gets defended
  • Whether you can debug your own wrong output by reading the result set and naming which part of the query produced the anomaly

How to prepare

  • Solve three problems while screen-sharing into a recording, then watch it back and mark every stretch longer than thirty seconds where you said nothing
  • Practise compressing the plan into one sentence before typing, then check afterwards whether the finished query actually matched it
  • Time yourself on statistics questions that carry a business reading, such as what a confidence interval does and does not claim, rather than re-reading notes without a clock

Final Round

A loop is not scored one interview at a time. The people you meet compare notes afterwards, usually in a meeting you are not in, and the outcome turns on what each of them can say about you when asked. That rewards something other than survival: every room needs one specific thing worth repeating, and none of them can contradict another. The common way to lose is to tell the same project four times with different numbers in it, or to be uniformly fine in a way that leaves nobody with anything to argue for.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether your account of a project survives being told twice, with the same scale, the same metric definition and the same numbers each time
  • Whether each interviewer leaves with one concrete claim they could make on your behalf later, rather than an absence of complaints
  • Whether a question you already answered in an earlier room gets the same answer at the same depth, without visible impatience

How to prepare

  • Write a one-page fact sheet for your two or three main projects that fixes the numbers you will quote: rows of data, the metric as a single sentence, the effect you measured and how long the work took. Say them aloud from the sheet until they come out identical every time
  • For each kind of room you expect, decide the one sentence you want that interviewer repeating in a debrief, then check during the mock that you said it outright instead of implying it
  • Rehearse answering the same project question twice in one sitting, the second time as though you had not just answered it, because the thing that needs fixing is the flatness that creeps into a repeated story

Where candidates lose points

Reading the most recent months of a claims-based series as real

Claims incur before they are reported and paid, so recent incurred months are systematically undercounted until runout completes. The lag is not uniform: pharmacy adjudicates in days, professional claims in weeks, inpatient facility claims in months. That means recent data is both too low and mix-shifted toward cheap services, which reads as a cost improvement and a utilisation drop at once. The fix is to hold the last three incurred months back or apply completion factors, and to state the paid-through date on every chart.

Rates built on member counts rather than exposure

Members join and leave mid-period, so dividing events by distinct members mixes a person covered for 30 days with one covered for 365. New joiners also have artificially low observed utilisation because their claims have not arrived yet and because care takes time to initiate. Denominators must be member-months or member-years, and comparative quality measures usually need a continuous-enrolment requirement with an explicit allowable gap, stated in days.

Reading an observational correlation as a causal effect

Name the confounder you are most worried about and the design that would remove it: an experiment, a difference-in-differences with a checked pre-period trend, an instrument, or a regression discontinuity. When none is available, state which direction the bias likely runs and bound the claim accordingly.

Solving silently instead of narrating the reasoning

Say which branch you are taking and why you chose it over the alternative, for example checking the denominator first because it changes what the comparison means. A correct answer that arrives with no visible path scores below a rigorous one that needed a hint.

Questions & practice

Write a function to calculate the mean and standard deviation of a list of numbers.

Medium · statistics and probability

Approach

  1. Translate the result into the decision it informs, in one plain sentence.
  2. Say what the estimate is of, and over what population it generalises.
  3. Write down the assumption the method needs before you use the method.

Follow-up

  • Which assumption here is most likely to be violated in practice?
  • What sample size would you need to detect an effect half this size?

What are some common metrics used to evaluate the performance of a classification algorithm?

Medium · machine learning and modelling

Approach

  1. Say how the offline result would be validated online before it is trusted.
  2. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
  3. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.

Follow-up

  • What would you monitor after launch to know the model is still valid?
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?

How would you approach building a predictive model for patient readmission?

Medium · machine learning and modelling

Approach

  1. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
  2. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
  3. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.

Follow-up

  • How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?

Describe a project where you utilized a machine learning model. What was the outcome?

Medium · machine learning and modelling

Approach

  1. Frame the prediction: the label, the moment of prediction, and the action it triggers.
  2. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
  3. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.

Follow-up

  • How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?
  • What would you monitor after launch to know the model is still valid?

Expand overlapping coverage spans into fractional member-months

Medium · interval expansion · denominators · vectorisation

member_enrollment has span_id, member_id, plan_id, product_type, effective_date, termination_date (NULL while active). Both dates are inclusive. Write a function returning one row per calendar month of a stated year with total member-months, where a member contributes covered days in the month divided by days in that month, capped at one month per member even when two spans overlap after a plan change or a retroactive span. Do not expand to one row per member-day: the sample has 400,000 members. Output: month, member_months.

Approach

  1. Resolve NULL termination_date to the reporting end date and say so in a comment. An open span is not an infinite span, and clipping it at the year end is what keeps the denominator finite and auditable.
  2. Merge overlapping and adjacent spans per member before touching months. Sort by member_id and effective_date, carry a running maximum of the end date, and open a new merged group when effective_date exceeds that running max plus one day. Adjacent means a gap of zero days, which a plan change produces constantly.
  3. Cross join the merged spans to the 12 month boundaries rather than to days. Overlap days = (min(span_end, month_end) - max(span_start, month_start)).days + 1, clipped below at 0. That is at most 12 rows per span instead of 365.
  4. Divide overlap days by the number of days in that month, so February and July are weighted correctly, then sum by month.
  5. Validate on a constructed member before trusting the aggregate: a single span covering the whole year must sum to exactly 12.0.

Worked solution (30 min)

  1. Fill termination_date nulls with the reporting end date and clip all spans to the reporting year.
  2. Sort by member_id, effective_date, then compute a running max end per member with cummax shifted by one, flag a new group where effective_date > prior_max_end + 1 day, and cumsum the flag to get merged group ids.
  3. Aggregate each group to min start and max end, producing disjoint spans per member.
  4. Cross join merged spans to a 12-row month frame, compute clipped overlap days, divide by days in month.
  5. Group by month and sum.

Expected result: Twelve rows. For a member with spans 2026-01-01 to 2026-03-15 and 2026-03-01 to 2026-06-30, March contributes exactly 1.0, not 15/31 plus 31/31. For a member with spans covering January and March only, January is 1.0, February is 0.0, March is 1.0, and the member totals 2.0.

Verify it yourself

  • A member with one span covering the full year sums to exactly 12.0 across the twelve rows.
  • Total member-months is less than or equal to (distinct members) x 12, and equality holds only if every member is covered all year.
  • Re-running the span merge on its own output changes nothing, which proves the merged spans are disjoint.
  • Recompute one member by brute-force day expansion and confirm the two agree to floating point tolerance.

Follow-up

  • Product type changes mid-year. The metric must be reported by product_type. Where does the cap now apply and what breaks?
  • An eligibility file arrives with a retroactive termination that shortens a span you already reported on. How do you restate?
  • Why member-months rather than distinct members, in one sentence, for a director who wants the simpler number?

Compute allowed PMPM by incurred month without span fan-out

Hard · fan-out · many-to-many · runout

Report allowed PMPM by incurred month and product_type for 2025 from medical_claim_line (member_id, claim_id, claim_version, frequency_code, service_start_date, allowed_amount, claim_status), pharmacy_claim (member_id, fill_date, allowed_amount, reversal_flag, reversed_fill_id), member_enrollment (span_id, member_id, product_type, effective_date, termination_date) and member_risk_score (member_id, score_year, prospective_risk_score), which holds at most one row per member per score year. The numerator is allowed_amount on surviving claim versions plus unreversed fills, attributed to the product_type in force on the service or fill date. The denominator is member-months. Also return a risk-adjusted PMPM for each cell: allowed PMPM divided by the member-month-weighted mean prospective_risk_score for score_year 2025 over the members making up that cell's denominator. A colleague joined claim lines to member_enrollment on member_id alone and the annual total came back 1.4 times the finance figure. Diagnose that, then produce the correct monthly series.

Approach

  1. Name the defect precisely. member_enrollment is one row per span, so joining on member_id alone is one-to-many and duplicates every claim line once per span that member ever held. The inflation factor is the spend-weighted mean span count per member, which is why 1.4 is plausible and why it is not a constant you can divide back out.
  2. Make the join functional: member_id AND service date between effective_date and COALESCE(termination_date, DATE '9999-12-31'). That yields at most one span per line unless spans genuinely overlap, in which case pick a documented precedence rule, most recently effective wins being the usual one, and prove uniqueness with a duplicate check rather than asserting it.
  3. Aggregate numerator and denominator separately and join them on (month, product_type). Computing both sides across one join is the second route to inflation, because the member-month denominator fans out over claim lines just as easily as the dollars fan out over spans.
  4. Clean each numerator source on its own terms: surviving claim versions with voids removed and claim_status 'paid' on the medical side, reversal rows and their originals removed on the pharmacy side.
  5. Apply completion before anyone reads a trend. State the paid-through date and either withhold the three most recent incurred months or apply completion factors, since the lag differs by service type and the incomplete tail reads as a cost improvement and a utilisation drop at once.
  6. Risk-adjust last, and weight the score the way the denominator is weighted. The divisor for a cell is SUM(member_months * prospective_risk_score) / SUM(member_months) over that cell's members, not a plain AVG over distinct members: a member covered two months must not count the same as one covered twelve. member_risk_score is member-level, so join it after the member-month grain is fixed, or it becomes a second fan-out.
  7. State the rule for members with no 2025 member_risk_score row: keep them in member_months, leave them out of the weighted mean, and publish the scored share of member-months beside the adjusted series. A thin score table moves the adjusted number while the raw one sits still, and without that share nobody can tell the two apart.

Follow-up

  • A member holds two overlapping spans under different product_types on the service date. Which one gets the dollar, and how do you keep the member-month denominator consistent with that choice?
  • Write the check that proves the span join is one-to-one rather than assuming it.
  • Finance reports on paid_date and you reported on service_start_date. Reconcile one month between the two bases.

Find inpatient encounters with no resulted lab during the stay

Medium · anti-join · null semantics · event matching

encounter holds encounter_id, patient_id, encounter_type, admit_ts, discharge_ts and facility_id. lab_result holds result_id, order_id, patient_id, encounter_id (NULL for outpatient standing orders), loinc_code, specimen_collected_ts, resulted_ts and result_status. Return every inpatient encounter discharged in 2025 with no final or corrected lab_result linked to it. A colleague wrote WHERE encounter_id NOT IN (SELECT encounter_id FROM lab_result) and got zero rows back. Say why, write the correct query, then say what changes when labs must instead be matched on patient_id with the specimen collected between admit_ts and discharge_ts.

Approach

  1. Name the mechanism rather than the symptom. x NOT IN (subquery) expands to x <> y1 AND x <> y2 AND ..., and a single NULL y makes that chain UNKNOWN, never TRUE. Since lab_result.encounter_id is nullable by design for standing orders, this query can only ever return zero rows.
  2. Rewrite as NOT EXISTS, or LEFT JOIN with an IS NULL filter. Both treat a NULL key as no match rather than as unknown. Adding IS NOT NULL inside the NOT IN subquery also works, but NOT EXISTS is the habit that survives someone making another column nullable later.
  3. Put the result_status predicate inside the correlated subquery or the ON clause, not in an outer WHERE. Outside, it turns the anti-join back into an inner join and an encounter whose only labs were cancelled disappears instead of qualifying.
  4. For the timestamp variant, match on patient_id with specimen_collected_ts inside the stay rather than resulted_ts. A specimen drawn an hour before discharge can result the next day, and anchoring on resulted_ts would wrongly call that stay lab-free.
  5. Restrict to encounter_type 'inpatient' and discharge_ts in 2025, and report open encounters with a NULL discharge_ts as a separate count instead of letting the filter swallow them.

Worked solution (20 min)

  1. Demonstrate the cause: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM lab_result WHERE encounter_id IS NULL returns a non-zero number.
  2. Write the NOT EXISTS version with result_status IN ('final','corrected') inside the correlated subquery.
  3. Write the LEFT JOIN version with the same predicate in the ON clause and WHERE l.result_id IS NULL, then compare counts.
  4. Build the timestamp variant joining on patient_id with specimen_collected_ts >= admit_ts AND < discharge_ts.
  5. Report both counts side by side and explain which encounters differ between the two definitions.

Expected result: One row per qualifying inpatient encounter with encounter_id, patient_id, facility_id, admit_ts and discharge_ts. The count is strictly below total 2025 inpatient discharges and strictly above zero, while the NOT IN version returns exactly zero rows.

Verify it yourself

  • NOT EXISTS and LEFT JOIN with IS NULL return identical row counts.
  • Adding AND encounter_id IS NOT NULL inside the NOT IN subquery reproduces the NOT EXISTS count exactly.
  • No returned encounter_id appears anywhere in lab_result with result_status in ('final','corrected').
  • The patient-and-timestamp variant returns fewer encounters than the encounter_id variant, since it also catches labs whose encounter link is missing.

Follow-up

  • Write the LEFT JOIN form and say exactly where the result_status predicate must sit for the two forms to agree.
  • How would you separate encounters whose only labs were cancelled from encounters with no lab rows at all?
  • Some encounters carry member_id NULL because the person index did not match. What does that do to a payer-side version of this measure?

If given a dataset with thousands of features, how would you determine which features to keep?

Medium · product sense and metrics

Approach

  1. Fix the population and the time window before naming any metric.
  2. Name one primary metric, then the guardrail that stops it being gamed.
  3. State what result would change your recommendation, so the answer is falsifiable.

Follow-up

  • Which segment would you cut first, and what would that rule out?
  • How would you detect that the metric is being gamed rather than genuinely improving?

How do you prioritize tasks when working on multiple projects?

Medium · product sense and metrics

Approach

  1. Name one primary metric, then the guardrail that stops it being gamed.
  2. State what result would change your recommendation, so the answer is falsifiable.
  3. Restate the decision this analysis has to support, and who acts on the answer.

Follow-up

  • What would you do if the primary metric and the guardrail moved in opposite directions?
  • How would you detect that the metric is being gamed rather than genuinely improving?

Explain the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning.

Medium

Approach

  1. Work from the decision backwards to the evidence you would need.
  2. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
  3. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.

Follow-up

  • What assumption would you test first?
  • How would you know your answer was wrong?

Design a switchback when a shared review queue breaks SUTVA

Medium · interference · switchback · carryover · clustered standard errors

A prior-authorisation auto-approval rule for a set of imaging procedure codes is meant to cut turnaround time. Requests sit in one shared queue worked by a fixed nurse pool across two review sites, so auto-approving one request frees reviewer capacity and speeds up the requests that were not auto-approved. Outcomes are median hours from received_date to adjudicated_at and the first-pass denial rate. Request-level randomisation is therefore invalid. Design the test: randomisation unit, block length, effective sample size, and the analysis.

Approach

  1. Name the violation precisely. The treatment assigned to one request changes the outcome of other requests through a shared capacity constraint, so the stable unit treatment value assumption fails and a request-level difference in means estimates neither the direct effect nor the total effect.
  2. Randomise time rather than requests: assign the policy on or off for whole (site, time block) cells. Every request inside a block experiences one consistent queue regime, so the block-level contrast is a genuine system-level effect including the capacity spillover you care about.
  3. Choose block length from the carryover horizon, not from convenience. Estimate how long the queue takes to return to steady state after a load shock from the historical backlog series, then set blocks well longer than that and discard a burn-in equal to the drain time at the start of each block.
  4. Analyse at the block level. The unit of analysis is the block mean, the effective sample size is the number of analysable blocks and not the tens of thousands of requests inside them, and standard errors must be cluster-robust or HAC because adjacent blocks share staffing and seasonality.
  5. Balance the calendar deliberately: use whole weeks, or block on day of week, so the policy is not disproportionately on during Mondays. If the shared resource can instead be partitioned (separate nurse pods with separate queues), cluster randomisation on pods is simpler, but with two sites you have two clusters, which is not a design.

Worked solution (35 min)

  1. Estimate the queue drain time from historical backlog after a volume spike, and set block length to several multiples of it (for example weekly blocks if the queue settles within a day).
  2. Randomise policy on or off independently per (site, week), balanced so each site gets roughly half treated weeks.
  3. Drop the burn-in window at the start of each block, then compute one block-level summary per (site, week) for each outcome.
  4. Estimate the effect as a block-level regression of the summary on the treatment indicator with site and calendar-period fixed effects, using cluster-robust or HAC standard errors.
  5. Power the study from the historical block-to-block standard deviation of the outcome, not from request-level variance.

Expected result: A switchback randomised at (site, week) with a discarded burn-in, analysed on block means with site and period fixed effects and HAC or cluster-robust standard errors. With two sites over 26 weeks the effective sample is about 52 block observations, fewer after burn-in, and that is the number the MDE must be computed from.

Verify it yourself

  • Lag-1 autocorrelation of block means after burn-in should be near zero; if it is not, the blocks are too short for the carryover.
  • Treated and control blocks should be balanced across day-of-week and month.
  • Run the randomisation labels on historical data as an A/A and confirm a null effect with correct interval coverage.
  • The block-level standard deviation should be materially larger than request-level SD over sqrt(requests per block), which is the tell that clustering matters.

Follow-up

  • Suppose you had randomised at the request level and 30 percent of the effect leaked to the control requests. What does that do to the required sample size?
  • Turnaround time is right-skewed with a long tail. Would you analyse block medians, block means, or something else?
  • How would you detect that your chosen block length is too short for the carryover you assumed?

Protocol deviations fell as new sites came online

Hard · reporting lag · denominator mix · clustering

Protocol deviations per 100 completed visits across a multi-site study fell from 4.6 to 2.9 over two months while randomisation accelerated. study_subject_visit carries study_id, site_id, subject_id, visit_number, visit_name, planned_visit_date, actual_visit_date, visit_window_days, visit_status, protocol_deviation_flag, deviation_severity, data_entry_ts and site_activation_date. Operations wants to credit a retraining rollout that began in that window. Establish whether deviation behaviour changed, and deliver a version of the series that is safe to review monthly.

Approach

  1. Treat deviation flags as late-arriving data. Build a lag triangle of data_entry_ts minus actual_visit_date, because deviations are largely identified during monitoring review weeks after the visit, so the two most recent months are structurally undercounted in exactly the way an improvement looks.
  2. Hold back the months that are not developed, or apply development factors fitted on fully developed months, and restate. Do this before any explanation involving training.
  3. Attack the denominator. It counts visits with visit_status 'completed', while out_of_window and missed visits are excluded even though out-of-window attendance is itself a deviation in most protocols, so a site that pushes visits out of window lowers the rate twice over.
  4. Standardise the visit mix. Newly activated sites contribute mostly screening and baseline visits, which carry fewer procedures and fewer opportunities to deviate than later treatment visits, so compute the rate within visit_number strata and reweight to a fixed mix before comparing months.
  5. Split major from minor deviation_severity and report them separately. A single major deviation can remove a subject from the per-protocol analysis set while ten minor ones may not, so a pooled rate can fall while the consequential series rises.
  6. Before attributing anything to training, model at the right level: subjects are nested in sites, so use a random intercept per site or cluster-robust standard errors. With average cluster size m and intracluster correlation rho the variance is understated by the design effect 1 + (m - 1) times rho, which at m = 60 and rho = 0.02 is about 2.2, so naive intervals are roughly 1.5 times too narrow.

Follow-up

  • Design a defensible evaluation of the retraining rollout, given it was deployed site by site and cannot be withheld.
  • Your reweighted series is flat but major deviations rose. What do you escalate and to whom?
  • How would you decide the holdback period, and how would you communicate a provisional number without it being quoted as final?

Suggested practice checklist

Roughly 90 minutes a night on weekdays with one longer weekend block. The plan deliberately cuts scope rather than compressing everything, on the assumption that finishing one thing a night beats half-starting four.

Day 1 — Fix the scope and set a baseline

  • Read the role description and write the three things the loop will almost certainly test, then write an explicit not-doing list for everything else and keep it visible all week.
  • Take one 20-minute SQL prompt and one 10-minute metric question cold, and write the single sentence that says what blocked each attempt, since that sentence is what decides which two topics get the most evenings.
  • Set the week's one rule: one problem finished to completion every night, including the night you only have 40 minutes.

Deliverable: A one-page scope with an explicit not-doing list and two cold attempts, each carrying one sentence on what blocked it.

Day 2 — One query pattern, written three times

  • Choose the single pattern most likely to appear (a cohort retention grid, or a funnel counted by user) and write it three times from a blank file rather than editing the previous attempt.
  • On the third attempt, write the grain of every CTE as a comment before writing its body.
  • Stop at 90 minutes even if the third version is imperfect, and write the one thing you would fix with another hour.

Deliverable: Three independent versions of the same query plus a note on what changed between them.

Day 3 — Only the statistics you will be asked to defend

  • Write, in under 200 words, how you would decide whether a difference between two groups is real: the test, its assumptions, and what you would switch to when an assumption fails.
  • Compute a 95 percent confidence interval for a difference in proportions by hand on realistic numbers, then write in one sentence what changes if the two samples are paired rather than independent.
  • Write your answer to "what does a p-value mean", check it against a definition, and delete the version that describes it as the probability the hypothesis is true.

Deliverable: A 200-word written answer and one hand-computed interval you can reproduce under pressure.

Day 4 — One case, and the assumptions holding it up

  • Answer one product case aloud in 20 minutes with a recording running, then listen back with a pen and mark every claim you asserted without saying what it rested on: an assumed user behaviour, an assumed data source, an assumed baseline rate, an assumed grain.
  • Pick the three assumptions the recommendation actually depends on, write how you would check each one against data, and say which one being wrong would flip the recommendation rather than merely weaken it.
  • Write the four-step structure you used onto a card small enough to hold in working memory when you are nervous.

Deliverable: One recording, three load-bearing assumptions each with a written check, and a four-step structure card.

Day 5 — Your own work, timed

  • Write a 90-second version and a four-minute version of your main project, and time both out loud rather than reading them.
  • Prepare answers to the two follow-ups that always come: what you would do differently, and how you knew it worked.
  • Put one number in the first sentence and be able to say exactly where that number came from and what it excludes.

Deliverable: Two timed narratives with one defensible number in the opening line.

Day 6 — The one full rehearsal, in a longer weekend block

  • Run a 60-minute mock covering query work, a case and a behavioural question in a single sitting with no breaks, because sustained attention is the thing evenings have not trained.
  • Immediately afterwards, and before hearing any feedback, write the three moments you lost the thread.
  • Spend the rest of the block only on those three moments, and on nothing you merely feel shaky about.

Deliverable: Mock notes naming three failure moments with a specific fix written under each.

Day 7 — Taper

  • Write the 20-minute warm-up you will actually do on the morning of the interview: one query you can already write from a blank file, one metric you can define out loud, and nothing you have never seen before.
  • Re-read only your own notes from this week, and open no new material.
  • Write down the logistics: the tool you will be asked to work in, whether lookups are allowed, and the sentence you will use when you do not know something.

Deliverable: A one-page card holding the case structure, the project numbers, and the logistics.

Rigour against a deadline

Nearly every data role forces a trade between the analysis you want and the one that fits the decision window. Prepare a case where you deliberately shipped something less rigorous, named the weakness to the person relying on it, and said what would change your answer. The naming is the part interviewers listen for.

How do you handle missing data in a dataset?

Medium · behavioural and stakeholder questions

Approach

  1. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on your reasoning.
  2. Pick a story where you drove the decision, not one where you observed it.
  3. Quantify the outcome, including what you would not claim credit for.

Follow-up

  • How did you know the outcome was caused by your change?
  • What would you do differently if you ran that project again?

Describe a situation where you had to navigate ambiguity in a project.

Medium · behavioural and stakeholder questions

Approach

  1. Quantify the outcome, including what you would not claim credit for.
  2. Pick a story where you drove the decision, not one where you observed it.
  3. Name the disagreement or constraint, and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

  • What did you decide not to do, and why?
  • What would you do differently if you ran that project again?

Make an honest case for your own analytical impact

Hard · impact attribution · counterfactual · self-assessment

You are asked to account for a year of your work. Constraint: you may only use measures that existed before you knew the outcome, and you must include one project that moved nothing. The portfolio contains a measure specification that changed how a contract settles, a predictive model that shipped, a self-serve dashboard, and an evaluation that killed a proposed programme. Deliverable: how you attribute value to each, which of them you claim credit for and which you do not, and the one number you would accept being judged on next year.

Approach

  1. The probe is whether you can reason counterfactually about your own work, which is the same discipline this domain demands of you for programmes, applied where it is uncomfortable.
  2. State the counterfactual for each item: what would have happened without you. A measure specification that changed how a contract settles has a dollar counterfactual you can compute. A dashboard's counterfactual is analyst hours, which is real and small, and attaching a revenue number to it is where these accounts usually turn into fiction.
  3. Treat the killed programme as your strongest item and say why. Avoided spend is real value, it is attributable because the decision turned on your evaluation, and it is the one item nobody else will count on your behalf.
  4. Report the shipped model the way you would report anyone's model: calibration in the subgroups that matter, adoption by the people it was built for, and whether any decision changed. A model that is live but ignored has zero impact, and saying so is the credibility test in this answer.
  5. Name the failed project with its mechanism and its cost, then say what earlier signal you would watch to kill it sooner. Time to kill is a legitimate impact measure.
  6. Choose next year's number so that it can go down. A metric that only ratchets upward is not a commitment.

Follow-up

  • Two other people also claim the contract measure. How do you split it?
  • Your model is live and used, but the decisions it informs would have been the same without it. Is that impact?
  • What is the strongest argument that your year had less impact than you just described?