Huron Consulting Group is a leading consultancy helping clients drive growth, enhance performance, and sustain leadership within their markets. The company specializes in building innovation capabilities and accelerating growth initiatives, offering services to a variety of healthcare organizations. By empowering leaders and employees, Huron helps these organizations create sustainable growth, optimize internal processes, and improve clinical outcomes.

The Data Engineer position at Huron's Perception Health Platform involves managing, transforming, distributing, and refining data assets to drive insightful analytics. This role requires working with large datasets built from billions of daily-ingested medical claims. Your responsibilities will include collaborating with product leadership, software engineers, data analysts, and data scientists to support and drive platform growth, focusing on creating robust, available, and accurate datasets.

If you're eyeing this dynamic role, this guide by Interview Query will navigate you through the interview process, common questions, and essential preparation tips. Dive in and get ready to enhance your career with Huron!

Submitting Your Application

The first step is to submit a compelling application that reflects your technical skills and interest in joining Huron Consulting Group as a Data Engineer. Whether you were contacted by a Huron recruiter or have taken the initiative yourself, carefully review the job description and tailor your CV according to the prerequisites.

Tailoring your CV may include identifying specific keywords that the hiring manager might use to filter resumes and crafting a targeted cover letter. Furthermore, don’t forget to highlight relevant skills and mention your work experiences.

Recruiter/Hiring Manager Call Screening

If your CV happens to be among the shortlisted few, a recruiter from the Huron Talent Acquisition Team will make contact and verify key details like your experiences and skill level. Behavioral questions may also be a part of the screening process.

In some cases, the Huron Data Engineer hiring manager stays present during the screening round to answer your queries about the role and the company itself. They may also indulge in surface-level technical and behavioral discussions.

The whole recruiter call should take about 30 minutes.

Technical Virtual Interview

Successfully navigating the recruiter round will present you with an invitation for the technical screening round. Technical screening for the Huron Data Engineer role usually is conducted through virtual means, including video conference and screen sharing. Questions in this 1-hour long interview stage may revolve around Huron’s data systems, ETL pipelines, and SQL queries.

In the case of data engineering roles, take-home assignments regarding data transformation, pipeline design, and data integration are incorporated. Apart from these, your proficiency in handling cloud-based ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP) and familiarity with healthcare data standards may also be assessed during the round.

Depending on the seniority of the position, case studies and real-scenario problems may also be assigned.

Onsite Interview Rounds

Followed by a second recruiter call outlining the next stage, you’ll be invited to attend the onsite interview loop. Multiple interview rounds, varying with the role, will be conducted during your day at the Huron office. Your technical prowess, including programming and data modeling capabilities, will be evaluated against the finalized candidates throughout these interviews.

If you were assigned take-home exercises, a presentation round may also await you during the onsite interview for the Data Engineer role at Huron.

Quick Tips For Huron Consulting Group Data Engineer Interviews

You should plan to brush up on any technical skills and try as many practice interview questions and mock interviews as possible. A few tips for acing your Huron interview include:

• Know Your Healthcare Market: Huron helps healthcare organizations to build innovation capabilities and accelerate key growth initiatives. Understanding the problems and potential growth areas in the healthcare market can give you an edge.
• Be Technically Adept: Huron’s data engineering roles necessitate strong knowledge in SQL, Python, ETLs, and cloud platforms like AWS. Make sure you are comfortable with data integration, batch processing, and cloud-based ecosystems.
• Team Collaboration: Huron emphasizes working closely with internal clients, analysts, and product leadership. Be prepared to discuss past experiences where collaborative efforts led to successful outcomes.

Typically, interviews at Huron Consulting Group vary by role and team, but commonly Data Engineer interviews follow a fairly standardized process across these question topics.

• How would you set up an A/B test for button color and position changes? A team wants to A/B test changes in a sign-up funnel, such as changing a button from red to blue and/or moving it from the top to the bottom of the page. How would you set up this test?

• How would you forecast Facebook's revenue for the next year? You work on the revenue forecasting team at a company like Facebook. An executive asks you to forecast the company's revenue for the coming year. How would you approach this task?

• How would you determine if an email campaign redesign led to increased conversion rates? An E-commerce store's new marketing manager redesigned the new-user email journey, and conversion rates increased from 40% to 43%. However, the rate was 45% a few months prior. How would you investigate if the redesign caused the increase?

• How would you ensure data quality across multiple ETL platforms for PayPal's market research? PayPal is conducting market research in Southern Africa, storing survey data within each country's borders. You need to ensure data quality across ETL pipelines connecting PayPal’s data marts with the survey platform’s data warehouses, including translation modules. How would you do this?

• How would you conduct an experiment to test Uber's ETA range feature? Uber is considering a new feature to display ETA as a range (e.g., 3-7 minutes) instead of a direct estimate. How would you conduct this experiment and determine if the results are significant?

• Write a function min_distance to calculate the minimum absolute distance between two elements in an array and return all pairs with that difference. Given an array of integers, write a function min_distance to calculate the minimum absolute distance between two elements and return all pairs having that absolute difference. Ensure the pairs are returned in ascending order.

• Write a query to select the top five most expensive projects by budget to employee count ratio, accounting for duplicate rows in the employee_projects table. Given two tables, projects and employee_projects, write a query to select the five most expensive projects by budget to employee count ratio. Ensure the query accounts for duplicate rows in the employee_projects table.

• Write a function to simulate drawing balls from a jar. Given a list jar with ball colors and a corresponding list n_balls with counts, write a function to simulate drawing a ball from the jar.

• Design three classes: text_editor, moving_text_editor, and smart_text_editor with specific functionalities. Design three classes: text_editor, moving_text_editor, and smart_text_editor. Each class should have specific methods for writing, deleting, and performing special operations on text.

• Write a query to determine the top 5 actions performed during Thanksgiving week and rank them. Given an events table, write a query to determine the top 5 actions performed during the week of Thanksgiving (11/22/2020 - 11/28/2020) and rank them based on the number of times performed. If two actions were performed equally, they should have the same rank.

• How would you explain what a p-value is to someone who is not technical? Explain the concept of a p-value in simple terms to a non-technical person, focusing on its role in determining the significance of results in statistical tests.

• What is the probability that it's actually raining in Seattle given your friends' responses? You called 3 friends in Seattle to ask if it's raining. Each has a 2/3 chance of telling the truth and a 1/3 chance of lying. All 3 said "Yes." Calculate the probability that it is actually raining.

• What is the probability of drawing three cards in increasing order from a shuffled deck of 500 cards? Imagine a deck of 500 cards numbered from 1 to 500. If you pick three cards one at a time, what is the probability that each subsequent card will be larger than the previous one?

• How would you test if survey responses were filled at random by certain individuals? You have survey data from multiple-choice questions. Describe how you would test if some individuals filled out the survey randomly rather than truthfully.

• What is the probability of getting exactly 5 heads in 6 tosses of a biased coin? Given a biased coin that lands heads 30% of the time, calculate the probability of getting exactly 5 heads out of 6 tosses.

• What kind of model did the co-worker develop for loan approval? Your co-worker developed a model that takes customer inputs and returns a decision on whether a loan should be given or not. Identify the type of model used.

• How would you measure the difference between two credit risk models? Given that personal loans are monthly installments, how would you compare the performance of two credit risk models over a specific timeframe?

• What metrics would you track to measure the success of the new credit risk model? Identify the key metrics you would track to evaluate the success of a new credit risk model for personal loans.

• When would you use a bagging algorithm versus a boosting algorithm? Compare two machine learning algorithms and explain when you would use a bagging algorithm instead of a boosting algorithm. Provide examples of the tradeoffs between the two.

• How would you detect firearm listings on a marketplace? Design a system to automatically detect if a listing on your website's marketplace is selling a gun, in compliance with the Terms of Service Agreement and legal regulations.

• How would you design a model to map legal first names to nicknames? As a data scientist at Facebook, you need to create a machine learning model that maps legal first names to likely nicknames. Describe your approach to designing this model.

• How would you tackle multicollinearity in multiple linear regression? Explain the methods you would use to address multicollinearity when performing multiple linear regression.

Embarking on a career with Huron Consulting Group as a Data Engineer means joining a team that’s dedicated to driving growth, enhancing performance, and fostering leadership in the healthcare market. You'll work with cutting-edge analytics platforms and collaborate with industry leaders to bring about meaningful and substantive changes in healthcare organizations. To excel in this role, having robust skills in SQL, Python, cloud-based ecosystems, and an understanding of Data Lake/Lakehouse technologies is crucial. Ready to make a difference and drive innovation in healthcare? Dive deeper into what Huron can offer and prepare effectively with our detailed Huron Consulting Group Interview Guide. At Interview Query, we arm you with the tools, confidence, and strategic insights to navigate every challenge and ace your interview. Discover all our company interview guides to enhance your preparation. Good luck with your interview!