Bank of America Data Scientist interview questions

11 Data Scientists have shared notes from their Bank of America interviews, with the questions they were asked in each round. That is 24% of the 46 Bank of America interview notes on Screna AI.

11 Data Scientist interview notes

Bank of America·Data Scientist·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round for a Data Scientist role at Bank of America. Four prompts, all pretty standard initiative-and-impact stuff, but the quantitative project one tripped me up more than I expected.
  • Tell me about a key accomplishment that shows you went beyond what was expected of you. Walk through the context, what you actually did, and the measurable result.
  • Walk me through a quantitative or technical project you're proud of from school or work. What were you trying to accomplish, what tools did you use and why, and what came out of it?
  • Describe a time you had to solve a complex problem that required deep analysis. What was the problem, how did you approach it, what solution did you pick and why, and how did you actually get it implemented?
  • Tell me about a time you deliberately built a strong working relationship with someone, whether a teammate, manager, or client. What did you do, what made it hard, and what was the outcome?

“I had a solid story ready but I rambled too long on the context and barely had time to land the outcome.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Take-home Assignment

Jun 2026
Got sent a SQL-heavy take-home for a Data Scientist role. Four tasks, all tied together around FX conversion and revenue reporting. Felt more like a data engineering screen than anything else, but I guess that's just how these go now.
  • Write a SQL query to convert all transactions to USD using the most recent available FX rate on or before the transaction date (a point-in-time join). Output should include transaction ID, date, customer, product, region, category, segment, USD amount, and a flag for missing FX rates.
  • Build a pivot-style monthly revenue report for a three-month window, with product categories as rows and regions as columns, plus a total column. The months must be derived dynamically from the data, not hardcoded.
  • For a single target month, return the top customer by USD revenue within each region. Ties should be broken first by the highest individual transaction amount in that month, then by customer ID alphabetically.
  • Identify transactions where no FX rate exists within the 30 days prior to the transaction date for non-USD currencies. Explain briefly how you would monitor this gap in a production environment.

“This is the one I spent the most time on.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Went through what seemed like a theory-heavy screening for a Data Scientist role at Bank of America. Lots of stats and ML fundamentals, the kind of stuff you think you know cold until someone asks you to write it out precisely.
  • You roll two fair six-sided dice. What is the probability that the two dice show different values? And what is the probability that one specific die shows a strictly higher value than the other?
  • Define mean and variance of a random variable.
  • Is the standard sample variance estimator biased, and if so what correction makes it unbiased?
  • If X and Y are each normally distributed and their correlation is zero, does that mean they are independent? Under what condition does zero correlation actually imply independence?
  • Explain linear regression and walk through the assumptions behind OLS.
  • What is the closed-form solution for the OLS estimator?
  • Why is multicollinearity a problem in regression, and how do you detect and address it?
  • Explain Ridge and Lasso regression and how they relate to the multicollinearity problem.
  • Explain PCA, including what eigenvalues and eigenvectors represent in that context, and what the main limitations are.

“The first part is easy enough, 30 out of 36 outcomes are unequal so 5/6.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral screen for a Data Scientist role at Bank of America. Just the one question, relationship-building focused, pretty standard stuff for a big bank.
  • Tell me about a time you made a deliberate effort to build a strong working relationship with a teammate, manager, or client. What did you actually do, what made it hard, and what came of it?

“Classic behavioral prompt.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Bank of America. The questions were a mix of behavioral and technical, leaning pretty heavily on structured storytelling about past projects and relationships. Nothing too surprising but you need solid examples ready.
  • What accomplishment best demonstrates that you go above and beyond what's expected of you?
  • Walk me through a quantitative or technical project you're proud of. What was the goal, what tools did you use, why those tools, and what happened?
  • Tell me about a complex problem that required deep analysis. Describe the problem, how you analyzed it, the solution you chose and why, any obstacles, and how you rolled it out.
  • Describe a time you worked to build a strong relationship with a teammate, manager, or client. What did you do, what made it hard, and what came of it?

“I picked a project where I built out an additional analysis nobody asked for and it ended up changing the team's direction.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Got a coding question for a Data Scientist role that felt more like a software engineering screen than anything DS-related. One question, math-flavored, and the constraint about not using built-in integer conversion is what made it actually tricky.
  • Given a very large number stored as a decimal string (potentially millions of digits long), determine whether it is divisible by 8, without converting the whole string to an integer.

“My first instinct was just int(s) % 8 == 0 and call it a day, but the constraint kills that immediately.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
SQL-heavy technical screen for a data scientist role, all four questions were variations on the same dataset about users and events. Felt like a real take-home vibe but done live, which made the window function stuff more stressful than it needed to be.
  • Given a users table and an events table, compute the 7-day conversion rate by country as of a fixed date. Define conversion rate as users with at least one purchase divided by users with at least one visit in the same window, counting each user at most once in numerator and denominator.
  • For each user, return their first purchase date and the number of days between signup and first purchase. Use window functions to handle any duplicate events.
  • Using a self join on the events table, identify users who had at least one visit that occurred strictly before their first purchase.
  • Explain how the choice between LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN would change the conversion rate results if certain countries have no purchases during the window.

“This took me longer than I expected to set up correctly.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026
Got an online assessment for a Data Scientist role at Bank of America. One coding problem, string manipulation with a greedy twist. Pretty standard OA vibe but the problem had a bit more math to it than I expected.
  • Given a string, assign distinct integer values 1 through 26 to each letter of the alphabet (case-insensitive, ignoring punctuation and spaces). The beauty of the string is the sum of each letter's assigned value multiplied by how many times it appears. Write a solution that computes the maximum possible beauty for each input string.

“The greedy insight is pretty straightforward once you see it: sort letters by frequency descending, then assign the highest beauty values to the most frequent ones.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Had a round at Bank of America for a Data Scientist position that leaned pretty heavily into macro awareness and how you'd actually apply it to quant work. One question but it had a lot of moving parts.
  • Pick a current world event and walk through how it's impacting financial markets, what that means for a quant/data science role, and how you'd factor it into your day-to-day modeling or decisions.

“This one tripped me up more than I expected.”

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Bank of America·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Bank of America Data Scientist interview that included a coding round where they asked you to walk through your solution in detail afterward, covering complexity, alternatives, and trade-offs. More of a technical deep-dive than a pure coding test.
  • Walk through the logic of your coding solution step by step, analyze its time and space complexity, propose at least one alternative approach, and explain why you chose your solution over the alternative.

“This was the part I was least prepared for.”

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