Citibank Data Science Interview

Citicorp and Travelers’ Group has total assets of $1.7 trillion.

Vimarsh Karbhari
Acing AI
3 min readMay 7, 2019

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In America, Citibank is one of the four main firms that accounts for half of the nation’s total mortgages, and two-thirds of the total credit cards. Although this institution isn’t necessarily the largest in America, it is often considered to be the largest banking facility across the globe. Citibank serves a mass number of over 200 million customers across a span of 160 countries. Its main location functions through Citibank Europe, stationed in the Czech Republic. The Spend Tracker which is quite common at banks all over the world today was started by Citibank first. Citibank which provides such heterogeneous financial products showcases a wide variety of information on its spend tracker for its customers from sign-on bonuses, bonus amounts and expiration dates, bonus miles, and even how much you have to spend in order to get certain rewards. Such varied information across multiple products and across 200 million customers makes it one of the best companies for Data Scientists to work at.

Interview Process

The interview process starts with a phone interview. The phone interview is a basic Data Science Q&A interview. The phone interview is followed by an onsite interview. The onsite interview consists of interview with team leads, team members and SVPs. There may or may not be an online SQL assessment before the onsite. The SQL assessment is usually a difficult one.

Important Reading

Data Science Related Interview Questions

  • Given a list of integers, find all combinations that sum to a given integer.
  • Segment a long string into a set of valid words using a dictionary. Return false if the string cannot be segmented. What is the complexity of your solution?
  • Write a SQL query to find the repeated items in a column.
  • How do you use the Q data structure to maintain the state in Spark.
  • Design a Trading system with high throughput and low latency.
  • How do you describe a financial planning process?
  • What would you prefer, being attacked by a giant chicken or 100 small ones?
  • What problems did you encounter in your project(resume based) and what are the solutions you did?
  • Explain your thesis in layman’s terms.
  • Find the second maximum value of a column in a Database table.

Reflecting on the Questions

The data science team at Citigroup uses Hadoop and Spark. They have a geographical diverse team located in the US, Europe and India. Their questions are a mix of questions related to coding, SQL, Systems Design, Hadoop and Spark. They are based on foundational and deep aspects of Data Science. If you work hard on your basics, you can surely land a job at one of the largest banks of the world!

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The sole motivation of this blog article is to learn about Citibank and its technologies helping people to get into it. All data is sourced from online public sources. I aim to make this a living document, so any updates and suggested changes can always be included. Please provide relevant feedback.

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