EY
Ernst & Young Global Limited, a multinational professional services partnership.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Medium
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Backend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Consulting often requires adapting to new client environments quickly. Describe a time you had to rapidly learn a new technology or domain to deliver a project.
#Continuous Learning
#Agility
#Consulting
Backend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you strongly disagreed with a senior engineer or architect on a technical approach. How did you resolve it?
#Conflict Resolution
#Teamwork
#Professionalism
Backend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you realized you were going to miss a critical project deadline. How did you handle the communication with the client and your team?
#Project Management
#Accountability
#Communication
Backend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you identified a process bottleneck or technical debt and took the initiative to improve it. What was the impact?
#Initiative
#Process Improvement
#Technical Debt
Backend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex technical architectural decision to a non-technical stakeholder, such as an EY partner or a client.
#Stakeholder Management
#Communication
#Consulting
Backend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
EY places a strong emphasis on diversity and inclusiveness. Can you share an example of how you fostered an inclusive environment in your previous engineering team?
#Diversity
#Inclusion
#Team Culture
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an array of strings, group the anagrams together. You can return the answer in any order.
#Strings
#Hash Table
#Sorting
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a string s, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
#Strings
#Sliding Window
#Hash Table
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query using window functions to calculate a running total of transaction amounts per client, ordered by transaction date.
#SQL
#Window Functions
#Data Analysis
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Find the Kth largest element in an unsorted array. Note that it is the kth largest element in the sorted order, not the kth distinct element.
#Arrays
#Heap
#Divide and Conquer
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an array of intervals where intervals[i] = [starti, endi], merge all overlapping intervals. We use this logic to consolidate billable hours or tax periods.
#Arrays
#Sorting
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a binary search tree (BST), find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) node of two given nodes in the BST.
#Trees
#Binary Search Tree
#Recursion
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a string containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid. This is often used in our tax formula parsing engines.
#Strings
#Stack
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array of integers and an integer target, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to target. Assume exactly one solution exists.
#Arrays
#Hash Table
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the second highest salary from an Employee table.
#SQL
#Subqueries
#Aggregation
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Design and implement a data structure for Least Recently Used (LRU) cache. It should support get and put operations in O(1) time.
#Design
#Hash Table
#Doubly-Linked List
Backend Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a function to reverse a singly linked list.
#Linked Lists
#Pointers
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a distributed cache system for a high-traffic financial reporting dashboard.
#Caching
#Distributed Systems
#Data Consistency
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a notification system that sends email, SMS, and in-app alerts to clients regarding upcoming compliance deadlines.
#Asynchronous Processing
#Third-party Integration
#Scalability
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system for an enterprise application used by auditors, managers, and clients.
#Security
#Database Schema
#Authorization
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a highly available and tamper-proof audit logging system for a financial services application.
#Microservices
#Databases
#Security
#Event Sourcing
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a document ingestion and processing pipeline for millions of tax forms uploaded by clients during peak tax season.
#Scalability
#Asynchronous Processing
#Cloud Storage
#Queues
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable REST API for a client portal that handles millions of requests. How do you manage rate limiting and caching?
#API Design
#Caching
#Rate Limiting
#Load Balancing
Backend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time fraud detection system for processing credit card transactions.
#Stream Processing
#Machine Learning Integration
#Low Latency
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What are the core differences between RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka? Which would you choose for an event-driven audit system and why?
#Message Brokers
#Kafka
#RabbitMQ
#Event Driven Architecture
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you secure a microservice architecture? Explain how OAuth2 and JWT work in a distributed environment.
#Microservices
#Authentication
#Authorization
#JWT
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Discuss the pros and cons of monolithic vs. microservices architectures. In what scenario would you recommend a client stick with a monolith?
#Microservices
#Monolith
#System Architecture
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the Circuit Breaker pattern. In a microservices architecture, when and why would you implement it?
#Microservices
#Resilience
#Design Patterns
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes in a relational database. When would you use one over the other?
#SQL
#Performance Tuning
#Database Internals
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How does garbage collection work in your primary language (Java or C#)? How would you identify and troubleshoot a memory leak in a production backend service?
#Memory Management
#Garbage Collection
#Debugging
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle transaction management in Spring Boot or .NET Core? Explain propagation levels.
#Java
#C#
#Spring Boot
#.NET
#Transactions
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is the N+1 query problem? How do you identify and resolve it in an ORM like Hibernate or Entity Framework?
#ORM
#SQL
#Performance Optimization
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the principles of SOLID design. Give a practical example of how you applied the Dependency Inversion Principle in a recent project.
#Design Patterns
#SOLID
#Clean Code
#OOP
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the CAP theorem. How does it influence your database choices when building a distributed financial ledger?
#Architecture
#Databases
#CAP Theorem
Backend Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you implement idempotency in a REST API, specifically for a payment or transaction creation endpoint?
#REST
#Idempotency
#Distributed Systems
#Payments
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Tell me about a time you proactively identified and implemented a cost-saving measure in a cloud environment.
#Cost Optimization
#Initiative
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
hard
Tell me about a time you discovered a major security flaw in a deployed architecture. What steps did you take?
#Incident Response
#Integrity
#Security
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why do you want to work as a Cloud Engineer in a consulting firm like EY rather than a traditional tech product company?
#Motivation
#Consulting
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to push back on a client's technical request because it was not best practice.
#Stakeholder Management
#Communication
#Leadership
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Explain the concept of 'Infrastructure as Code' to a non-technical business stakeholder who is worried about project costs.
#Communication
#Business Acumen
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where a cloud migration project you were working on was falling behind schedule. How did you handle it?
#Time Management
#Problem Solving
#Delivery
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
The cloud ecosystem changes rapidly. How do you stay updated with the latest Azure/AWS features and determine which ones are relevant for your clients?
#Continuous Learning
#Adaptability
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script to parse a large JSON log file, count the number of HTTP 500 errors, and output the top 3 IP addresses causing them.
#Python
#Log Parsing
#Data Structures
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a reusable Terraform module to create an Azure Virtual Network (or AWS VPC) with public and private subnets.
#Terraform
#Networking
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a string containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid.
#Data Structures
#Stacks
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a Bash script that finds all files in a directory older than 30 days and archives them into a tarball.
#Bash
#Linux
#Automation
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script using the boto3 (AWS) or azure-mgmt (Azure) SDK to list all virtual machines that are missing a specific 'Environment' tag.
#Python
#Cloud SDK
#Automation
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A legacy bank wants to connect their on-premise mainframe to cloud-native analytics tools. Design the connectivity and data flow.
#Hybrid Cloud
#Networking
#Data Integration
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a centralized logging and monitoring system for a multi-cloud environment (Azure and AWS).
#Monitoring
#Logging
#Multi-Cloud
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices-based application deploying to Kubernetes.
#CI/CD
#Kubernetes
#Microservices
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How do you design a Disaster Recovery strategy for a mission-critical database with an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 1 hour?
#Disaster Recovery
#Databases
#High Availability
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Explain how you would design an Azure Landing Zone for a highly regulated financial client.
#Azure
#Landing Zone
#Security
#Compliance
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an event-driven architecture to process and store millions of audit logs daily for an enterprise client.
#Event-Driven
#Data Engineering
#Messaging
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a secure data lake architecture to handle PII (Personally Identifiable Information)?
#Data Lake
#Security
#Compliance
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an API Gateway setup that includes rate limiting and WAF to protect a legacy backend system.
#API Gateway
#Security
#Networking
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available, multi-region web application for a global retail client preparing for Black Friday.
#High Availability
#Load Balancing
#Scalability
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
A client's cloud spend has increased by 40% over the last quarter without a corresponding increase in traffic. How do you investigate and remediate this?
#Cost Optimization
#Monitoring
#FinOps
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
A client wants to migrate their monolithic application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). How would you secure the cluster?
#Kubernetes
#AKS
#Security
#Networking
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you manage Terraform state files securely in a multi-developer, multi-environment setup?
#Terraform
#State Management
#Security
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you detect and remediate infrastructure drift when someone makes a manual change in the cloud console instead of using Terraform?
#Terraform
#Governance
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
What Git branching strategy would you recommend for a distributed consulting team working on a fast-paced cloud infrastructure project?
#Git
#Version Control
#Team Collaboration
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
A deployment pipeline failed in production, and the client is escalating the issue. Walk me through your troubleshooting steps.
#Troubleshooting
#CI/CD
#Consulting
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you optimize a Dockerfile for a Node.js application to ensure the image is small and secure?
#Docker
#Security
#Optimization
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between Blue-Green and Canary deployments. When would you use one over the other?
#Deployment Strategies
#CI/CD
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you securely inject database credentials into a CI/CD pipeline without hardcoding them?
#CI/CD
#Secrets Management
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
A client wants to move 500 on-premise VMs to the cloud. Walk me through your decision framework for choosing between Lift & Shift (Rehosting) vs Refactoring.
#Migration
#Strategy
#Consulting
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you mitigate cold starts in serverless architectures like Azure Functions or AWS Lambda?
#Serverless
#Performance Optimization
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is the difference between Azure Policy and Azure RBAC? Give an example of when to use each.
#Azure
#Governance
#Security
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the Principle of Least Privilege and how you implement it using AWS IAM or Azure RBAC.
#IAM
#RBAC
#Security
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
When would you recommend a client use Azure ExpressRoute versus a Site-to-Site VPN?
#Azure
#Networking
#Hybrid Cloud
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex data pipeline failure or technical issue to a non-technical client partner.
#Communication
#Client Management
#Consulting
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why do you want to work at EY? How do your career goals align with our mission of 'Building a better working world'?
#Company Knowledge
#Motivation
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where a client changed the data requirements halfway through a sprint. How did you handle it?
#Agile
#Adaptability
#Stakeholder Management
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you optimized a slow-running ETL pipeline. What specific metrics did you improve, and what was the business impact?
#Performance Optimization
#Impact
#Technical Leadership
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you disagreed with a senior engineer or architect's design on a client project. How did you resolve the disagreement?
#Conflict Resolution
#Teamwork
#Professionalism
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you found a critical data discrepancy in a production environment. What was your troubleshooting process?
#Problem Solving
#Incident Management
#Accountability
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the second highest salary in each department. If a department has less than two employees, return null for that department.
#Window Functions
#CTEs
#Aggregations
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script using boto3 or azure-storage-blob to upload a local file to cloud storage, including basic error handling and logging.
#Cloud SDKs
#Error Handling
#I/O
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a Python function to flatten a deeply nested JSON object representing complex financial records from a client API.
#Data Manipulation
#Recursion
#JSON
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query using window functions to calculate the 7-day rolling average of daily transaction volumes for our financial audit clients.
#Window Functions
#Data Aggregation
#Time Series
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a PySpark script to read a CSV file from Azure Data Lake, filter out records with null client IDs, and write the output to Parquet format partitioned by transaction date.
#Data I/O
#DataFrames
#Partitioning
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a PySpark snippet to perform a left anti join. Explain a business use case for this operation in an audit context.
#Joins
#Data Validation
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Given a table of user logins, write a SQL query to find the maximum number of consecutive days each user logged in.
#Advanced SQL
#Gaps and Islands Problem
#CTEs
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to identify and delete duplicate records in a massive transaction table without using the DISTINCT keyword.
#Data Cleansing
#CTEs
#Window Functions
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time streaming pipeline for detecting fraudulent credit card transactions for a banking client.
#Stream Processing
#Kafka/Event Hubs
#Fraud Detection
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a data migration strategy from an on-premise Oracle database to Azure Synapse Analytics with minimal downtime?
#Cloud Migration
#Azure Synapse
#Change Data Capture (CDC)
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a data reconciliation process to ensure data integrity between a source ERP system and a target cloud data warehouse.
#Data Quality
#Reconciliation
#Audit
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a batch processing pipeline to ingest daily financial audit logs from 50 different client on-premise systems into a centralized Azure Data Lake.
#Azure Data Factory
#Batch Processing
#Data Integration
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle dependency management and failure retries in Apache Airflow?
#Apache Airflow
#DAGs
#Error Handling
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the difference between RANK(), DENSE_RANK(), and ROW_NUMBER(). Provide a scenario in a client reporting dashboard where you would choose DENSE_RANK() over RANK().
#Window Functions
#Data Ranking
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you handle data skewness when performing a join in PySpark on a massive dataset of retail transactions?
#Performance Tuning
#Data Skew
#Distributed Computing
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between narrow and wide transformations in Spark. Why is this distinction important for optimizing ETL pipelines?
#Spark Architecture
#Transformations
#Shuffling
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
What is the difference between repartition() and coalesce() in PySpark? When would you use one over the other?
#Partitioning
#Performance Tuning
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold). How have you implemented this in Databricks for a client project?
#Data Lakehouse
#Databricks
#Data Modeling
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the architecture of Azure Data Factory. What is the role of an Integration Runtime, and when would you use a Self-Hosted IR?
#Azure Data Factory
#Cloud Architecture
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you secure data at rest and in transit in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2? How do you manage access for different client teams?
#Cloud Security
#Azure
#IAM
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
In Azure Databricks, how do you manage secrets and credentials securely without hardcoding them in your notebooks?
#Security
#Databricks
#Azure Key Vault
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is Delta Lake? Explain how it achieves ACID transactions on top of cloud object storage.
#Delta Lake
#ACID
#Data Lakehouse
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the Parquet file format. Why is it preferred over CSV or JSON in big data processing pipelines?
#File Formats
#Performance
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What are Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)? Explain the difference between Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3 with examples.
#Data Warehousing
#Dimensional Modeling
#SCD
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between a Star Schema and a Snowflake Schema. Which is generally preferred in modern cloud data warehouses like Snowflake or Synapse, and why?
#Data Warehousing
#Schema Design
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you manage memory efficiently when processing large datasets in Python (e.g., 10GB CSV) without using distributed frameworks like Spark?
#Memory Management
#Pandas
#Generators
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of XComs in Airflow. What are their limitations, and how do you pass large datasets between tasks?
#Apache Airflow
#Data Passing
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is dbt (data build tool)? How does it fit into the modern data stack, and what are the benefits of using it for transformations?
#dbt
#ELT
#Data Transformation
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you ensure CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) in your data engineering projects? Describe the tools and workflow.
#CI/CD
#Git
#Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions
Data Scientist
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where a client provided you with data that was incredibly messy, incomplete, or structurally flawed. How did you handle it to deliver the project on time?
#Data Cleaning
#Client Management
#Adaptability
Data Scientist
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to manage multiple competing priorities across different client engagements. How did you ensure nothing fell through the cracks?
#Prioritization
#Organization
#Consulting Skills
Data Scientist
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time when you realized halfway through a project that your initial machine learning approach was not going to work. How did you pivot?
#Problem Solving
#Agile
#Resilience
Data Scientist
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to explain a highly technical data science concept or model limitation to a client or senior stakeholder who had no technical background.
#Stakeholder Management
#Communication
#Consulting Skills
Data Scientist
•
Behavioral
•
hard
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior manager or partner regarding the technical approach to a data science problem. How did you resolve it?
#Conflict Resolution
#Communication
#Influence
Data Scientist
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why do you want to work at EY, and how do you see the role of a Data Scientist differing in a Big 4 consulting firm compared to a traditional tech company?
#Company Knowledge
#Career Goals
#Consulting Mindset
Data Scientist
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time when a machine learning model you deployed failed or degraded in production. How did you diagnose and fix the issue?
#MLOps
#Troubleshooting
#Accountability
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to calculate the month-over-month percentage growth in billable hours for each consultant.
#SQL
#Window Functions
#Time Series Data
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a list of intervals representing meeting times, write a function to merge all overlapping intervals. This is useful for calculating continuous billable periods.
#Arrays
#Sorting
#Intervals
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a Python function to calculate the TF-IDF scores for a corpus of documents from scratch (without using scikit-learn).
#NLP
#Math
#Python
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a SQL query to find the 3rd highest salary from an Employee table. If there is no 3rd highest salary, return null.
#SQL
#Subqueries
#LIMIT/OFFSET
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query using window functions to find the top 3 clients by revenue in each of EY's global service lines (Assurance, Consulting, Tax, Strategy and Transactions) for the last fiscal year.
#SQL
#Window Functions
#Data Aggregation
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a dataset of historical stock prices, write a Python algorithm to calculate the maximum profit you could achieve from a single buy and a single sell transaction.
#Arrays
#Dynamic Programming
#Optimization
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array of transaction amounts and a target fraudulent sum, write a function to return the indices of the two transactions that add up exactly to the target sum.
#Arrays
#Hash Maps
#Time Complexity
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a string containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid. This is useful for parsing nested JSON logs from Azure.
#Stacks
#String Parsing
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script to find the Kth largest transaction amount in an unsorted array of millions of transactions.
#Heaps
#Sorting
#Optimization
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
medium
You have a table of employee project assignments with start and end dates. Write a SQL query to find any overlapping project assignments for the same employee.
#SQL
#Self Joins
#Date Functions
Data Scientist
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python function using Pandas to merge a client CRM dataset with a transaction log dataset, ensuring that missing values in the 'industry' column are imputed with the most frequent industry for that region.
#Python
#Pandas
#Data Cleaning
#Imputation
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable data architecture to ingest, process, and analyze daily point-of-sale data from 10,000 retail locations for a supply chain optimization project.
#Big Data
#Data Warehousing
#ETL/ELT
#Cloud Architecture
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a system to automatically redact Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from millions of client emails and documents before they are used for model training.
#Data Privacy
#NLP
#Data Engineering
#Security
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time anomaly detection system for a global bank's SWIFT transactions to prevent money laundering.
#Real-time Processing
#Anomaly Detection
#Streaming
#Kafka
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an end-to-end machine learning pipeline on Microsoft Azure to predict client churn for our tax advisory services. Walk me through data ingestion, model training, deployment, and monitoring.
#Azure ML
#MLOps
#Pipeline Design
#Model Deployment
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
We are conducting due diligence for an M&A deal and have thousands of PDF contracts. How would you design an NLP solution to extract specific liability clauses and summarize them?
#NLP
#OCR
#Information Extraction
#LLMs
Data Scientist
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a recommendation engine to cross-sell EY's advisory services to existing audit clients, ensuring strict compliance with independence rules.
#Recommendation Systems
#Collaborative Filtering
#Data Privacy
#Business Logic
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you ensure that a machine learning model used for HR recruiting or loan approvals does not exhibit algorithmic bias?
#Algorithmic Fairness
#Bias Mitigation
#Responsible AI
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
In financial crime consulting, we often deal with highly imbalanced datasets (e.g., 0.01% fraud cases). How would you approach building and evaluating a machine learning model for this scenario?
#Imbalanced Data
#Fraud Detection
#Evaluation Metrics
#SMOTE
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain how you would use SHAP or LIME to explain a complex XGBoost credit risk model to a non-technical audit partner who needs to sign off on its regulatory compliance.
#Model Interpretability
#SHAP
#LIME
#Stakeholder Communication
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
What is the bias-variance tradeoff? How does it apply when tuning hyperparameters for a Random Forest model predicting audit anomalies?
#Model Theory
#Bias-Variance Tradeoff
#Random Forest
#Hyperparameter Tuning
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between L1 (Lasso) and L2 (Ridge) regularization. In what EY consulting scenario would you prefer L1 over L2?
#Regularization
#Linear Models
#Feature Selection
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you check for stationarity in a time series dataset, and why is it a necessary step before building an ARIMA model for supply chain demand forecasting?
#Time Series Forecasting
#ARIMA
#Stationarity
#Statistical Tests
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
What is multicollinearity? How do you detect it, and how does it impact a logistic regression model used for credit scoring?
#Regression
#Statistics
#Multicollinearity
#VIF
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain the mathematical intuition behind Gradient Boosting. How does it differ from AdaBoost?
#Ensemble Methods
#Gradient Boosting
#Algorithm Theory
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
How would you evaluate the performance of an Unsupervised Learning model, specifically a K-Means clustering algorithm used to segment retail customers?
#Unsupervised Learning
#Clustering
#Evaluation Metrics
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of Data Drift and Concept Drift. How would you implement monitoring for these in a deployed Azure ML model?
#Model Monitoring
#Data Drift
#Concept Drift
#Azure ML
Data Scientist
•
Technical
•
medium
What are Word Embeddings? Compare Word2Vec with transformer-based embeddings like BERT in the context of analyzing financial sentiment in news articles.
#NLP
#Word Embeddings
#BERT
#Word2Vec
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you faced significant pushback from a client's development team regarding the adoption of strict CI/CD quality gates (like SonarQube coverage limits). How did you handle it?
#Client Management
#Communication
#DevSecOps
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
hard
You are leading a DevOps transformation for a client whose operations team is used to manual, ticket-based deployments. How do you win their trust and transition them to an IaC and CI/CD model?
#Change Management
#Consulting
#Empathy
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Describe a situation where you had to quickly learn a new technology or tool because a client mandated it, despite having no prior experience with it.
#Adaptability
#Continuous Learning
#Consulting
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to balance a tight project deadline with the need to implement proper security and compliance controls.
#Time Management
#Security
#Prioritization
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you identified a bottleneck in a software delivery process and took the initiative to automate or improve it.
#Process Improvement
#Automation
#Initiative
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time when you made a critical mistake that caused an outage or broke a deployment pipeline. How did you handle it, and what did you learn?
#Accountability
#Incident Management
#Post-mortem
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script using the 'requests' library to interact with a REST API. The script should authenticate using a Bearer token, fetch a list of users, and filter out users who are inactive.
#Python
#REST API
#JSON Parsing
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a Bash script that finds all files in a specific directory older than 30 days, archives them into a tarball, and deletes the original files.
#Bash
#Linux
#Automation
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a Python script that checks the SSL certificate expiration date for a given list of domains and sends an alert (prints to console) if any certificate expires in less than 30 days.
#Python
#Security
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script that parses a large Nginx access log file, counts the occurrences of HTTP 5xx errors, and outputs the top 5 IP addresses generating these errors.
#Python
#Log Parsing
#Data Structures
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Bash script to monitor CPU usage. If the usage exceeds 80% for 3 consecutive checks (10 seconds apart), the script should restart a specific systemd service.
#Bash
#Linux
#Monitoring
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Terraform module to provision an Azure Storage Account. Ensure that public network access is disabled and it only accepts traffic from a specific Virtual Network.
#Terraform
#Azure
#Networking
#Security
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy for an enterprise application hosted on Azure. The client requires an RPO of 15 minutes and an RTO of 2 hours.
#Disaster Recovery
#Azure
#RPO/RTO
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A client wants to ensure that no unapproved Docker images are deployed to their production AKS cluster. How would you enforce this?
#Kubernetes
#Security
#Policy Enforcement
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a secure, scalable CI/CD pipeline architecture for a microservices-based application with 50+ distinct services. How do you handle dependencies and pipeline sprawl?
#CI/CD
#Microservices
#Pipeline Architecture
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A financial services client wants to migrate their on-premise monolithic application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Walk me through your system design for a highly available, secure AKS architecture.
#Kubernetes
#Azure
#High Availability
#Microservices
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a centralized logging and monitoring solution for a distributed microservices architecture spread across multiple Azure regions.
#Monitoring
#Logging
#Azure Monitor
#ELK Stack
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a zero-downtime deployment pipeline for a mission-critical web application. Compare Blue-Green and Canary deployments, and explain which you would choose for a risk-averse banking client.
#CI/CD
#Deployment Strategies
#Traffic Routing
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you configure Prometheus to scrape custom metrics from a Python application, and how do you visualize them in Grafana?
#Prometheus
#Grafana
#Instrumentation
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
At EY, we frequently manage multi-tenant environments for different clients. How do you manage Terraform state files securely when deploying infrastructure across multiple environments (Dev, QA, Prod) and multiple clients?
#Terraform
#State Management
#Security
#Azure Storage
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
In Azure DevOps, what is the difference between Microsoft-hosted agents and self-hosted agents? When would you recommend a client use a self-hosted agent?
#Azure DevOps
#Build Agents
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
You notice a pod in a client's Kubernetes cluster is stuck in a 'CrashLoopBackOff' state. Walk me through your exact troubleshooting steps.
#Kubernetes
#Troubleshooting
#Docker
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you securely inject secrets (like database connection strings or API keys) into a Kubernetes pod without hardcoding them or exposing them in environment variables?
#Kubernetes
#Azure Key Vault
#Secrets Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
EY places a heavy emphasis on DevSecOps. How would you integrate Security (SAST, DAST, SCA) into an existing Jenkins or Azure DevOps pipeline?
#Security
#CI/CD
#Tool Integration
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA), and Cluster Autoscaler. How do they interact?
#Kubernetes
#Autoscaling
#Resource Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
A client's Terraform state file has become corrupted or out of sync with the actual cloud resources due to a manual intervention in the Azure Portal. How do you resolve this?
#Terraform
#Troubleshooting
#State Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is a Dockerfile multi-stage build? Why is it important, especially for enterprise clients with strict security and compliance requirements?
#Docker
#Security
#Optimization
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you handle database schema changes in an automated CI/CD pipeline without causing downtime or data loss?
#Databases
#Automation
#Migrations
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of GitOps. How does it differ from traditional CI/CD, and what tools would you use to implement it in a Kubernetes environment?
#GitOps
#ArgoCD
#Flux
#Kubernetes
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
In Kubernetes, what is the difference between an Ingress, a LoadBalancer, and a NodePort? When would you use each?
#Kubernetes
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain how you would use Ansible to patch 500 Linux servers across different environments (Dev, QA, Prod) with minimal disruption.
#Ansible
#Linux
#Patch Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
A client's application is experiencing intermittent connection timeouts to an Azure SQL Database. How do you troubleshoot this from a network and infrastructure perspective?
#Troubleshooting
#Networking
#Azure SQL
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What are Terraform Workspaces? How do they differ from using separate directories for environments, and what are the pros/cons of each approach?
#Terraform
#Environment Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in a shared Kubernetes cluster to ensure developers can only access their specific namespaces?
#Kubernetes
#RBAC
#Security
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the concept of 'Immutable Infrastructure'. What are its benefits, and how do you achieve it using tools like Packer and Terraform?
#Immutable Infrastructure
#Packer
#Terraform
Frontend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you found a significant bug in production. How did you handle it and what steps did you take to prevent it from happening again?
#Problem Solving
#Accountability
#Agile
Frontend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Tell me about a time you had to mentor a junior developer on your team who was struggling with a specific technology.
#Mentorship
#Teamwork
#Empathy
Frontend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to push back on a client's unrealistic frontend feature request during a consulting engagement.
#Communication
#Stakeholder Management
#Consulting
Frontend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to deliver a project with a very tight deadline. How did you ensure quality wasn't compromised?
#Time Management
#Prioritization
#Agile
Frontend Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you had to explain a complex frontend architectural decision or technical debt to a non-technical EY partner or client.
#Communication
#Leadership
#Consulting
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a JavaScript function that takes an array of objects and groups them by a specific property.
#Arrays
#Objects
#Data Manipulation
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a function to check if two strings are valid anagrams of each other.
#Strings
#Hash Maps
#Algorithms
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Implement an autocomplete search bar component in React that fetches data from an API as the user types.
#DOM Manipulation
#Events
#API Integration
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a function to deep clone a JavaScript object. Ensure it handles circular references.
#Recursion
#Memory Management
#JavaScript Core
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Implement a simple Event Emitter (pub/sub pattern) in JavaScript with `on`, `emit`, and `off` methods.
#Design Patterns
#JavaScript Core
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a polyfill for `Promise.all`.
#Promises
#Asynchronous
#Polyfills
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Implement a custom `useDebounce` React hook that we can use for a client search input in our tax auditing dashboard.
#React
#Hooks
#Performance
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a JavaScript function to flatten a deeply nested array of varying depths without using the built-in `Array.prototype.flat()`.
#Recursion
#Arrays
#JavaScript
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Implement a `throttle` function in JavaScript.
#Closures
#Timing
#Performance
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Implement a custom hook `useFetch` that takes a URL and returns `data`, `loading`, and `error` states. It should also handle component unmounting.
#React
#Hooks
#API Integration
Frontend Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Implement a reusable Modal component in React from scratch.
#React
#Portals
#UI Components
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a file upload component that supports drag-and-drop, progress bars, and chunking for large files (e.g., 2GB tax documents).
#Network
#UI Components
#File Handling
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a Micro-frontend architecture for an EY client portal where different service lines (Tax, Audit, Advisory) maintain their own UI modules.
#Micro-frontends
#Webpack Module Federation
#Architecture
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly scalable data grid component for an enterprise financial dashboard that needs to render 100,000+ rows of audit data without crashing the browser.
#Architecture
#Performance
#Virtualization
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a global notification/toast system for a complex web application.
#Architecture
#State Management
#UI Components
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an interactive dashboard for visualizing real-time audit data streaming in from multiple global servers.
#WebSockets
#Real-time
#Architecture
Frontend Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a secure authentication flow for a client-facing web app. How do you securely store tokens on the client side?
#Authentication
#JWT
#Security
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain Server-Side Rendering (SSR) vs Client-Side Rendering (CSR). When would you recommend SSR for a project?
#Next.js
#Rendering
#Performance
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the JavaScript Event Loop. How does it handle microtasks versus macrotasks?
#Asynchronous
#Event Loop
#JavaScript Core
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle state management in a large-scale React application? When would you choose Context API over Redux for an EY enterprise app?
#Redux
#Context API
#Architecture
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the difference between `interface` and `type` in TypeScript. When would you use one over the other?
#TypeScript
#Typing
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you optimize a React application that is experiencing performance bottlenecks while rendering a large list of financial records?
#React
#Performance
#Optimization
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
What is CSS Specificity and how do you prevent CSS conflicts in a large, multi-team project?
#CSS
#Styling
#Architecture
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
EY works with many government and enterprise clients. How do you ensure your frontend applications are accessible and WCAG compliant?
#A11y
#WCAG
#HTML
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
How does the Virtual DOM work in React, and why is it considered faster than manipulating the real DOM directly?
#React Core
#Reconciliation
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Describe your experience with CI/CD pipelines for frontend deployments. What steps do you typically include?
#Pipelines
#Testing
#Deployment
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
What are React Server Components (RSC) and how do they differ from traditional Server-Side Rendering (SSR)?
#React 18
#Architecture
#Performance
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you manage side effects in Redux? Compare Redux Thunk and Redux Saga.
#Redux
#Middleware
#Asynchronous
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) in a modern frontend application?
#Security
#Web Fundamentals
Frontend Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of Closures in JavaScript. Provide a practical use case where you would use a closure in a frontend app.
#JavaScript Core
#Scope
Full Stack Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex technical issue to a non-technical stakeholder, such as a client or an audit partner.
#Stakeholder Management
#Soft Skills
Full Stack Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you disagreed with a team member or tech lead on a technical approach. How did you resolve it?
#Conflict Resolution
#Teamwork
Full Stack Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to deliver a project under a very tight deadline. How did you prioritize your tasks?
#Prioritization
#Stress Management
Full Stack Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Give an example of a time you identified a bottleneck in a development process or application and took the initiative to improve it.
#Initiative
#Problem Solving
#Process Improvement
Full Stack Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to learn a completely new technology stack or framework very quickly to meet a client's requirement.
#Continuous Learning
#Flexibility
Full Stack Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why do you want to work at EY? What interests you about building software in the technology consulting and financial services space?
#Motivation
#Company Knowledge
Full Stack Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Working at EY means handling highly sensitive financial data. How do you ensure compliance and data security when developing a new feature?
#Security
#Best Practices
#SDLC
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a binary search tree (BST), find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) node of two given nodes in the BST.
#Trees
#Recursion
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query using window functions to calculate a running total of expenses per department, ordered by the date of the expense.
#Databases
#Window Functions
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a string s, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
#Strings
#Sliding Window
#Hash Maps
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a debounce function in JavaScript from scratch. Explain how it works and provide a practical use case in a React application.
#JavaScript
#Closures
#Performance
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array of integers nums and an integer target, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to target. You may assume that each input would have exactly one solution.
#Arrays
#Hash Maps
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a string s containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid.
#Strings
#Stacks
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Build a React component that fetches a list of users from an API and displays them in a table with server-side pagination.
#React
#API Integration
#State Management
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an m x n 2D binary grid grid which represents a map of '1's (land) and '0's (water), return the number of islands. An island is surrounded by water and is formed by connecting adjacent lands horizontally or vertically.
#Graphs
#DFS
#BFS
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the second highest transaction amount from a 'Transactions' table. If there is no second highest amount, return null.
#Databases
#Queries
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an array of intervals where intervals[i] = [starti, endi], merge all overlapping intervals, and return an array of the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the intervals in the input.
#Arrays
#Sorting
Full Stack Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a middleware function in Express.js (or ASP.NET Core) to rate-limit incoming API requests by IP address to prevent abuse.
#Node.js
#Middleware
#Security
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a notification system that alerts EY consultants via email and in-app push notifications when a client uploads a new compliance document.
#Pub/Sub
#Notifications
#Scalability
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a secure document upload and processing system for enterprise tax documents. The system must handle large files, scan for malware, and extract text via OCR.
#Cloud Storage
#Security
#Asynchronous Processing
#Microservices
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an immutable audit logging microservice for EY's internal financial tools that must handle millions of events per day and be easily queryable for compliance audits.
#Microservices
#Databases
#Scalability
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time collaborative spreadsheet application (similar to Excel Online) for financial modeling teams.
#WebSockets
#Concurrency
#Real-time Systems
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a distributed caching layer for a high-traffic financial reporting application to reduce database load.
#Caching
#Redis
#Performance
Full Stack Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable API Gateway for EY's internal suite of HR and resource management tools. It needs to handle routing, authentication, and rate limiting.
#API Gateway
#Microservices
#Security
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain the Saga pattern. How would you handle distributed transactions across multiple microservices where one step fails?
#Microservices
#Distributed Systems
#Patterns
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the CI/CD pipeline you would set up for a modern web application (React frontend, Node.js API). What stages would you include?
#CI/CD
#Automation
#Git
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Describe your approach to testing a full-stack application. What tools do you use for Unit, Integration, and End-to-End (E2E) testing?
#QA
#Unit Testing
#E2E
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you implement and secure JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication in a Node.js or .NET Core backend?
#Authentication
#Backend
#JWT
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between Clustered and Non-Clustered Indexes in a relational database like SQL Server.
#SQL
#Performance Optimization
#Data Structures
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Walk me through how you would deploy a containerized full-stack application (React frontend, Node.js backend, PostgreSQL) to Microsoft Azure.
#Azure
#Docker
#Deployment
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Compare REST and GraphQL. When would you choose to use GraphQL over REST for a client-facing dashboard?
#REST
#GraphQL
#Architecture
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Compare Redux, the React Context API, and modern alternatives like Zustand or Recoil for state management in a large-scale React application.
#React
#State Management
#Architecture
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) and how do you prevent it in a modern Single Page Application (SPA)?
#Web Security
#Frontend
#Backend
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the JavaScript Event Loop. How does it handle asynchronous operations like Promises and setTimeout?
#JavaScript
#Asynchronous Programming
#Architecture
Full Stack Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How does React's Virtual DOM work, and why is it considered faster than manipulating the Real DOM directly?
#React
#Performance
#DOM
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where client requirements changed drastically in the middle of a project. How did you adapt your ML approach?
#Agile
#Client Management
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
hard
Tell me about a time your model performed well offline during training but failed or underperformed in production. What was the root cause and how did you fix it?
#Production ML
#Debugging
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Working at EY often involves juggling multiple client engagements. How do you prioritize your tasks when faced with competing tight deadlines?
#Prioritization
#Consulting
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you disagreed with a senior team member or a client regarding a technical approach (e.g., choice of algorithm or architecture). How did you resolve it?
#Conflict Resolution
#Influence
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why EY? What interests you about working in technology consulting compared to working as an MLE at a traditional tech product company?
#Motivation
#Career Goals
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you identified a process or pipeline that was highly inefficient and took the initiative to automate or optimize it.
#Process Improvement
#Leadership
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex machine learning model to a non-technical stakeholder or client. How did you ensure they understood?
#Stakeholder Management
#Consulting
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an array of intervals where intervals[i] = [starti, endi], merge all overlapping intervals, and return an array of the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the intervals in the input.
#Arrays
#Sorting
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a string s, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
#Sliding Window
#Strings
#Hash Table
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Write a Python function to compute the TF-IDF scores for a given corpus of financial documents from scratch, without using Scikit-learn.
#NLP
#Math
#Python
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script using the multiprocessing library to parallelize the downloading and preprocessing of 10,000 images from given URLs.
#Python
#Multiprocessing
#Data Engineering
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query using window functions to calculate the 7-day rolling average of daily transaction volumes for our banking clients.
#Window Functions
#Data Aggregation
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Using Pandas, how would you efficiently group a dataset of 10 million rows by 'client_id' and find the second highest transaction amount for each client?
#Pandas
#Data Wrangling
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a string containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid.
#Stacks
#Strings
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array of integers nums and an integer target, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to target. You may assume that each input would have exactly one solution.
#Arrays
#Hash Table
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a recommendation engine for cross-selling financial products (e.g., credit cards, loans) to existing retail banking clients.
#Recommendation Systems
#Architecture
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Architect an MLOps pipeline on Azure. Walk me through how code pushed to a repository results in a deployed model.
#MLOps
#Azure
#CI/CD
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a churn prediction system for a telecom client. How would you structure the pipeline from raw data to actionable business insights?
#Predictive Modeling
#Batch Processing
#Business Impact
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable RAG-based chatbot for auditing tax documents. The system must handle thousands of concurrent users and strictly enforce data access controls.
#Generative AI
#RAG
#Security
#Scalability
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time credit card fraud detection system for a major bank.
#Real-time Processing
#Classification
#Architecture
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an ML system to automatically classify and extract key entities (e.g., vendor, amount, date) from millions of scanned financial invoices.
#NLP
#OCR
#Architecture
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain the architecture of a Transformer model. What is the role of self-attention?
#Transformers
#NLP
#Attention Mechanism
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How does Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) work, and when would you recommend a client use RAG instead of fine-tuning an LLM?
#LLMs
#RAG
#NLP
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What are the key differences between L1 (Lasso) and L2 (Ridge) regularization, and when would you use each?
#Regularization
#Linear Models
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the difference between Bagging and Boosting. Give an example of an algorithm for each.
#Ensemble Methods
#Random Forest
#XGBoost
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you evaluate an LLM's output for hallucination or factual accuracy in an automated pipeline?
#LLM Evaluation
#MLOps
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle highly imbalanced datasets, such as in a credit card fraud detection model where fraud represents 0.1% of the data?
#Classification
#Data Sampling
#Metrics
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the vanishing gradient problem in deep neural networks and discuss methods to mitigate it.
#Neural Networks
#Optimization
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
You are running a PySpark job on Databricks to process 5TB of client data, but it keeps failing with OutOfMemory (OOM) errors. How do you troubleshoot and optimize it?
#PySpark
#Databricks
#Distributed Computing
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is Data Drift vs Concept Drift? How do you monitor for them in a production ML system?
#Model Monitoring
#Production ML
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain how you would containerize a Python-based ML model using Docker and deploy it as a REST API.
#Docker
#API
#Deployment
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How does XGBoost handle missing values internally?
#XGBoost
#Algorithms
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the trade-off between precision and recall. Which is more important in medical diagnosis vs spam detection?
#Metrics
#Evaluation
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What are vector embeddings, and how do you store and query them efficiently at scale?
#Embeddings
#Vector Databases
Machine Learning Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you ensure fairness and mitigate bias in machine learning models, especially for models used in HR or lending?
#Ethics
#Bias
#Fairness
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to align conflicting priorities between a tax Subject Matter Expert (SME) and a technical engineering lead.
#Conflict Resolution
#Cross-functional Collaboration
#Communication
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
How do you handle pushback from senior partners when proposing a new product feature that deviates from traditional consulting methods?
#Stakeholder Management
#Influence
#Change Management
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you failed to deliver a product or feature on time. What was the root cause, and what did you learn?
#Failure
#Retrospectives
#Accountability
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
How do you prioritize a product backlog when every feature is marked 'high priority' by different business units?
#Prioritization Frameworks
#Backlog Management
#Stakeholder Negotiation
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to influence a team to adopt a new process without having direct authority over them.
#Influence without Authority
#Change Management
#Leadership
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
hard
Describe a time you had to pivot a product roadmap due to sudden changes in financial regulatory requirements.
#Adaptability
#Regulatory Compliance
#Roadmap Management
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why EY? What interests you about building tech products in the professional services and consulting sector?
#Company Knowledge
#Motivation
#Career Goals
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
What do you consider the biggest challenges in building software products for highly regulated industries like banking or auditing?
#RegTech
#Risk Management
#Industry Knowledge
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
How do you manage expectations with enterprise clients during a delayed product rollout?
#Client Communication
#Crisis Management
#Transparency
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you had to quickly learn a complex new domain (e.g., international tax law) to build a product.
#Continuous Learning
#Domain Expertise
#Research
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
hard
How do you handle a situation where the engineering team estimates a feature will take 3 months, but the client contract mandates delivery in 1 month?
#Scope Management
#Client Negotiation
#Agile Delivery
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
How do you ensure cross-functional collaboration across global teams, such as US business stakeholders and an offshore development team in India?
#Distributed Teams
#Communication
#Agile
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you identified a new market opportunity or use case for an existing product.
#Innovation
#Market Expansion
#Strategic Thinking
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
hard
How do you foster a culture of rapid innovation and experimentation within a traditionally risk-averse organization?
#Innovation
#Culture Change
#Risk Tolerance
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you had to sunset a product or feature. How did you handle the transition for your users?
#Sunsetting
#User Communication
#Product Lifecycle
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you used data to make a critical product decision that contradicted your initial intuition.
#Data-Driven Decisions
#Humility
#A/B Testing
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
How do you ensure your product team stays focused on driving user outcomes rather than just delivering a high volume of output?
#Outcomes vs Output
#OKRs
#Team Alignment
Product Manager
•
Behavioral
•
medium
How do you balance addressing technical debt with delivering new features requested by clients in a legacy enterprise system?
#Technical Debt
#Roadmap Planning
#Engineering Collaboration
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an automated expense auditing system for EY's internal use that flags fraudulent or non-compliant employee expenses.
#Automation
#Fraud Detection
#Internal Tools
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you design a dashboard for enterprise CFOs to track their company's global tax liabilities in real-time?
#Data Visualization
#Dashboard Design
#FinTech
Product Manager
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a secure document-sharing portal for EY clients to upload sensitive financial data for M&A due diligence.
#Security
#B2B SaaS
#User Experience
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
hard
EY is looking to build an AI-driven anomaly detection tool for external audits. How would you define the MVP?
#MVP Definition
#AI/ML Products
#Audit Technology
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
medium
What metrics would you track to monitor the adoption rate of a newly deployed enterprise risk management tool?
#Adoption Metrics
#B2B SaaS
#KPIs
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
hard
Pitch a new digital product that could help EY's tax practice automate manual data entry from unstructured client documents.
#Product Pitch
#Automation/RPA
#OCR/AI
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
hard
How do you ensure data privacy and GDPR compliance are built into a new data analytics product from day one?
#GDPR
#Data Privacy
#Privacy by Design
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
hard
What are the key considerations when migrating an on-premise financial reporting tool to the Microsoft Azure cloud?
#Cloud Migration
#Azure
#Enterprise Architecture
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
hard
Walk me through your process of taking a B2B SaaS product from 0 to 1 within a large enterprise like EY.
#0 to 1
#Product Lifecycle
#Enterprise Innovation
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
medium
Walk me through your framework for deciding whether EY should build a custom solution or integrate a third-party vendor tool for a client.
#Build vs Buy
#Strategic Planning
#Vendor Management
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
medium
How would you measure the success of an internal knowledge management platform used by EY consultants globally?
#Product Metrics
#Internal Tools
#User Engagement
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
easy
How do you incorporate accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG) into enterprise B2B products?
#Accessibility
#Inclusive Design
#Compliance
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
hard
Walk me through how you would price a new proprietary software tool EY plans to license to its audit clients.
#Pricing Strategy
#GTM
#B2B Licensing
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain how a REST API works to a non-technical audit partner.
#Technical Communication
#APIs
#Client Facing
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you conduct market research and competitive analysis for a highly specialized enterprise product, like ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting software?
#Competitive Analysis
#ESG
#Market Sizing
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
medium
How would you improve the user experience of a legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system integration?
#UX Design
#Enterprise Software
#System Integration
Product Manager
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you write user stories for complex financial compliance requirements where the rules are highly technical?
#Requirements Gathering
#User Stories
#Compliance
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex technical concept, like cloud migration or API integration, to a non-technical client or stakeholder.
#Client Facing
#Communication
#Consulting
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you disagreed with a Senior Engineer or Architect on a technical approach. How did you communicate your perspective and what was the outcome?
#Conflict Resolution
#Teamwork
#Leadership
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Consulting often involves tight deadlines. Tell me about a time you had to work under a strict deadline to deliver a critical project phase.
#Time Management
#Stress Management
#Delivery
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why EY? How does working in technology consulting differ from working at a traditional product company, and why does that appeal to you?
#Motivation
#Consulting
#Company Knowledge
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you identified a performance bottleneck in a system. What steps did you take to diagnose and resolve it?
#Problem Solving
#Performance
#Initiative
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you had to adapt to a sudden change in project requirements from a client midway through a sprint.
#Adaptability
#Agile
#Client Management
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Give an example of how you ensure code quality, security, and compliance in your deliverables, especially when dealing with sensitive financial data.
#Code Quality
#Security
#Best Practices
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Tell me about a time you took the initiative to learn a new technology or framework to solve a specific business problem for a client.
#Continuous Learning
#Initiative
#Problem Solving
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
How do you prioritize your tasks and manage your time when you are assigned to multiple client projects or facing competing priorities?
#Time Management
#Organization
#Consulting
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you failed to meet a client's expectation or missed a project milestone. How did you handle the communication, and what did you learn?
#Accountability
#Failure
#Client Management
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array of transaction amounts and a target audit sum, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to the target.
#Arrays
#Hash Table
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a string s and a dictionary of strings wordDict, return true if s can be segmented into a space-separated sequence of one or more dictionary words. Used for parsing continuous text in legacy financial documents.
#Dynamic Programming
#Memoization
#Trie
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array containing n distinct numbers taken from 0, 1, 2, ..., n representing sequential invoice numbers, find the one that is missing from the array.
#Math
#Bit Manipulation
#Arrays
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a binary search tree representing an organizational hierarchy, find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) node of two given employee nodes.
#Trees
#Binary Search Tree
#Recursion
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an integer array of expense category IDs and an integer k, return the k most frequent elements.
#Heaps
#Hash Table
#Bucket Sort
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given the head of a singly linked list representing a sequence of approval workflows, reverse the list and return the reversed list.
#Linked Lists
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a function to group an array of strings into anagrams. We sometimes use similar logic for fuzzy matching client names.
#Hash Table
#Strings
#Sorting
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an array of audit engagement time intervals where intervals[i] = [start_i, end_i], merge all overlapping intervals.
#Arrays
#Sorting
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a string containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid. This is often used to validate nested JSON structures in our tax APIs.
#Stacks
#String Manipulation
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a string of log data, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
#Sliding Window
#Hash Table
#Strings
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time fraud detection system that processes millions of daily financial transactions. How do you handle latency and data consistency?
#Stream Processing
#Big Data
#Latency
#NoSQL
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a centralized logging and monitoring system for a distributed cloud application deployed across multiple AWS/Azure regions.
#Observability
#Logging
#Distributed Systems
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you design a microservices architecture for an enterprise payroll system that processes payments for hundreds of thousands of employees globally on the last day of the month?
#Microservices
#Event-Driven Architecture
#Batch Processing
#Message Queues
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a RESTful API for a tax calculation service. Consider rate limiting, versioning, and handling varying tax rules per region.
#API Design
#Scalability
#Strategy Pattern
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a scalable document storage and retrieval system for EY audit reports. The system must handle millions of PDFs, support full-text search, and ensure strict access control.
#Cloud Storage
#Elasticsearch
#Security
#Microservices
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is a JWT (JSON Web Token)? Explain the workflow of authenticating and authorizing a user in a microservices architecture.
#JWT
#Authentication
#Microservices
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the second highest salary of an employee from an Employee table. How would you scale this to find the Nth highest?
#SQL
#Window Functions
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control. What are the benefits of using DI in a large-scale enterprise application?
#Dependency Injection
#IoC
#Testing
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle concurrency and thread safety in a Spring Boot or .NET Core application handling simultaneous client requests?
#Concurrency
#Multithreading
#Spring Boot
#.NET
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What is the difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes in SQL? How would you optimize a slow-running query on a table with 10 million transaction records?
#Databases
#SQL
#Performance Tuning
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the SOLID principles. Can you provide a specific example of how you applied the Single Responsibility Principle in your last project?
#SOLID
#Clean Code
#Design Patterns
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
What are the core principles of REST? Explain the difference between PUT and PATCH methods when updating a client record.
#REST
#API Design
#HTTP
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the four pillars of Object-Oriented Programming using a real-world banking or tax system example.
#OOP
#Java
#C#
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
What is the difference between an Abstract Class and an Interface? When would you use which in a C# or Java enterprise application?
#OOP
#Design Patterns
#Java
#C#
Software Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain how Garbage Collection works in Java or .NET. How do you prevent memory leaks in long-running batch processing applications?
#Memory Management
#Garbage Collection
#Performance
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