Deloitte Data Scientist Interview Guide

Headquartered in New York, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited is a privately-owned, multinational company offering professional services in audit & assurance, consulting, risk and tax assessments, and financial advisory. Since its inception in 1845, the company has developed into one of the largest accountancy and audit firms in the world, operating in over 150 countries around the world with over a quarter of a million employees.

With the largest client base among the “Big Four” accounting firms, Deloitte generates a massive amount of data through its services, working to leverage and analyze information for business design and organizational leadership. Using “market-leading, end-to-end portfolios of analytics and information management and solutions”, Deloitte provides its clientele with actionable data and insights for their businesses.

At Deloitte, data scientists largely contribute to consulting roles on other teams, working to provide a basis and information for decisions. These roles are specialized, ranging from perfecting models and algorithms to unlocking insights through advanced analytics concepts to significantly improve profitability.

In this way, data scientists may work on applying basic business analytics or statistical concepts or developing and designing predictive models, mining data, and optimizing information. Using Advanced Analytics & Modeling (AAM) concepts, data scientists work with machine learning/deep learning models and highly technical statistical techniques in order to provide end-to-end solutions from internal and external data.

Required Skills

Given the highly specialized data scientist roles at Deloitte, candidates for the position must have at least 3 years (5+ years for senior-level) of consulting or industry experience in data-related fields.

Other relevant qualifications include:

• Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, statistics, Management Information, Economics, Accounting, or other data-related fields.
• Experience with programming languages such as Python, R, VBA, SQL
• Experience with modelling and simulation analysis such as logistic and linear regression, text analytics, predictive analytics, natural language processing, optimization, decision trees, neural networks, or clustering techniques.
• Experience working with quantitative analysis of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• Experience working with big data technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Hadoop, and NoSQL datastores.
• Experience building scalable and high-performance data pipelines using Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, Pig & Hive.
• Proficiency with data extraction, transformation, and loading to support advanced analytics.
• Experience with cloud-based platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google.

The data science and analytics team at Deloitte works with other teams to unlock business opportunities through applied data decision-making generated from client data. Given the cross-functional aspect of the role data scientists play, job duties and responsibilities can span from business or machine learning analytics to predictive modeling.

• Analytics and Cognitive: Focus on leveraging the power of data analytics, mathematical techniques, and predictive modeling to uncover hidden relationships from vast troves of data. Work with clients to implement large-scale data ecosystems, including data management, governance, and the integration of structured and unstructured data to generate insights towards leveraging cloud-based platforms.

• Government and Public Services (GPS): Leverage sales and pipeline analytics of Deloitte’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system (Salesforce) to support and improve GPS sales. Apply natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning models to facilitate research and gather/design processes to mine various business developments to identify ways of improving growth rates.

• DevOps: Collaborate with data engineers to build and maintain cutting-edge AI solutions that provide clients with real-time customer insights. Collaborate with the data science team to deliver production-level grade pipelines, including building ETL jobs to ingest data into a database, curating and cataloging metadata about ETL datasets, and implementing data model solutions.

• Finance and Administration: Provide expertise, support, and resources that enable businesses to get their jobs done more efficiently. Collaborates cross-functionally with teams to discover top-quality solutions and innovation to solve the challenges of today and tomorrow.

• Engineering (Deloitte Digital): Build and maintain state-of-the-art marketing platform that provides clients with a single view towards their customers’ brand interactions across all channels (in-store, online, call centers). Design, build and maintain cutting-edge data solutions to furnish Deloitte’s clients with real-time customer insights to deliver value.

The Deloitte data scientist interview follows most tech companies’ standard data scientist interview patterns. It starts with a phone call from a recruiter discussing, at length, past projects or relevant experiences and how they fit into the plan of the data scientist team you are interviewing for.

It is important to make a good impression on this interview by outlining only relevant experiences that align with the team’s objectives. After the initial interview, the recruiter will then schedule an onsite interview with fellow data scientists, the hiring manager, and the team manager.

Initial Screen

This is an introductory phone or video interview with a recruiter that usually lasts for 30 to 60 minutes. This is just a standard “run of the mill” interview with questions revolving around your background experiences, past projects, and work experience that might relate to the job role. The main focus will be to learn more about your background, and simultaneously, you will learn more about Deloitte’s culture and the job role.

Note: This interview may include some technical elements, so you should prepare for some SQL and machine questions.

Sample Questions:

• Tell me about a time when you had to work with difficult people.
• Why consulting and why Deloitte?

The Onsite Interview

The standard Deloitte onsite interview process includes different interview rounds consisting of a mixture of behavioral, technical, and case-based interviews.

There are four to five interview rounds (one culture-fit, two behavioral, and two technical), each lasting up to 45 minutes with a panel of interviewers: team members, other data scientists, the senior manager, the hiring manager, and partners/director. Data science interview questions are case study-based and sometimes open-ended in nature. Technical questions are standardized, spanning a wide range of data science concepts.

A typical Deloitte data scientist interview consists of:

• A behavioral interview: This is an interview with a partner/client.
• A culture-fit interview: This is an interview with a senior manager and revolves around past projects and how they relate to the job role.
• A technical interview with a hiring manager: potential questions include Python, SQL, R, and basic statistic and probability.
• Another technical interview with the manager: this is an interview to assess your core machine learning algorithmic knowledge. It also assesses your mathematical solving skills and business domain knowledge.

• Remember, Deloitte data scientist interview processes are structured to assess candidates’ ability to leverage data science concepts to deliver science-based and data-driven insights. Deloitte hires experts with extensive industry experience who can leverage data analytics to solve problems, uncover new insights, and help Deloitte’s clients improve the quality of their decision-making.
• Deloitte’s data science interview questions are standardized and can span a wide range of concepts. Remember to brush up on your statistics, logistic regression, time series, SQL, machine learning, and predictive modeling knowledge. Practicing coding on the whiteboard and mid-level data scientist questions can help you mentally prepare for the onsite technical interview.

• How would you solve a problem for a client who wants to compete with the best cab company?
• What’s your favorite ML algorithm?
• What’s the difference between random forest and extra tree classifier?
• Design a database for an e-commerce website like Amazon?

See more Deloitte data scientist questions from Interview Query:

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