Schonfeld·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Got a probability brain teaser for a Data Scientist role at Schonfeld. Just the one question from what I can tell, classic quant-style puzzle that sounds approachable until you actually try to work through it rigorously.
- 100 passengers board a plane with 100 numbered seats. Passenger 1 is drunk and picks a random seat. Every passenger after that sits in their assigned seat if it's free, or picks randomly from the remaining empty seats if not. What's the probability that passenger 100 ends up in their own seat?
“I'd seen a version of this before so I wasn't totally lost, but I still fumbled explaining it cleanly under pressure.”