Bank of America Interview Questions — Page 3

Bank of America·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Went into a senior software engineer technical screen, spent about five minutes on the actual HackerRank problem before copy-pasting it into an AI and telling the interviewer the whole format was a waste of time. Surprisingly, the interviewer agreed completely and we spent the rest of the 90-minute slot just talking shop. No next round is coming, but it was weirdly the best interview conversation I've had in months.

Implement a coding solution to a given algorithmic problem on HackerRank.
How would you explain what a translation lookaside buffer is and how it's used?

“Copied the question straight into Claude, pasted the output back, and then just told the interviewer what I did and why.”

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Bank of America·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

SQL interview question that turned into an infinite gotcha loop. Every answer I gave, the interviewer added a new constraint until I had no idea what the right answer even was anymore.

What is the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE, and which would you use to remove all rows from a table?

“I knew this cold.”

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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·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Quant Engineer interview at Bank of America that was pretty heavy on regression theory. They went deep on the math, not just surface-level definitions, so if you're rusty on derivations you'll feel it.

What is regression, and what specifically does a linear regression model try to capture?
Walk me through the classical assumptions underlying OLS estimation.
Derive the OLS closed-form estimator.
Why is multicollinearity a problem in regression, and what are your options for dealing with it?
Compare Lasso and Ridge regularization. When would you choose one over the other, and what's the geometric or probabilistic intuition behind each?

“Seemed like a warmup but they actually wanted precision.”

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Bank of America·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Quant Engineer interview at Bank of America that leaned heavily into statistics fundamentals. The probability and estimation questions were more rigorous than I expected for what I thought would be a more coding-focused screen.

Define the mean and variance of a random variable, then for a sample x_1 through x_n: is the sample mean an unbiased estimator? Is the sample variance biased when you divide by n, and why does dividing by (n-1) fix that? Walk through the algebra.

“This looked like a warmup and turned into a 15-minute deep dive.”

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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·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jun 2026

Went through a full SRE hiring loop at a large FinTech company after about a month of selective job searching. Three rounds total including a pretty intense technical screen, an onsite with whiteboard stuff, and a behavioral with the director who basically told me I had the job. Ended up with an offer at a higher level than I was at before, which felt like a win even if they bumped me down one level from what I originally applied for.

How did you manage completing a Master's degree while working full time?
Walk me through a hypothetical production incident. How would you approach diagnosing and resolving it?
Explain your understanding of Kubernetes and how you've used it in your work.
Write a SQL query to solve [a given problem].
Solve a LeetCode-style medium coding problem.
Design a system architecture for a given scenario on a whiteboard.
Answer trivia-style questions about Java and Python.
General cloud computing concepts and architecture questions.

“The recruiter asked this in a way that felt like she was trying to catch me in a lie.”

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Bank of America·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Short technical screen for a quant engineer role, basically just one puzzle-style question with a follow-up that scaled the problem up.

There are prisoners wearing hats of k different colors (generalized from 2). Each prisoner can see all other hats but not their own. They must simultaneously guess their own hat color. What strategy maximizes the number of correct guesses?

“The 2-color version I'd seen before so I felt okay, but when they pushed it to k colors I had to actually think.”

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Bank of America·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Went through a technical screen for a Quant Engineer role at Bank of America. Heavy on the statistics and ML theory side, which I wasn't fully expecting. PCA came up in a way that felt more like a grad school oral exam than a job interview.

Walk me through how PCA works, including what eigenvalues and eigenvectors represent in that context, and then discuss its main limitations.

“This was basically three questions in one and I didn't pace myself well.”

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Bank of America·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Brief technical screen for a software engineer role, focused on a chargeback ingestion system. Not much to report, pretty narrow scope.

Walk me through how you would design a chargeback ingestion system that exports finalized transactions to CSV and sends them to a payment network via FTP on a scheduled basis.

“The CSV-to-FTP pipeline part felt almost too simple to talk about for long, but there's actually a decent amount hiding in there around scheduling, failure handling, and idempotency.”

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