Case study for the final round of interview with BlackRock

Congratulationson moving forward! We ask candidates to do a quick project as the last round. The project is meant to give you a tangible experience to use when deciding if this is the right career choice for you, now. You will present this to a panel of people which gives us a great opportunity to understand your thinking and communication style and skills. The panel presentation is also helpful to you because you will be exposed to our culture, team and purpose; giving you another datapoint to make a decision on.

This project is based on real-events, so it’s a good depiction of our day-day and the challenges data engineers encounter.

Project:

As a data engineer, take charge and tell us or show us how you would deliver a data product for one of these investment challenges:

1. Our investors are very interested in creating synthetic indexes that are better than the consumer price index, the first-time home buyer index, and US jobless claims. Can you deliver? How? Show us.
2. We want to know what grocery items are being delivered in the US and which delivery companies are expanding the fastest and where (Instacart, Amazon Fresh, Walmart delivery, etc.). The thought is if delivery areas are expanding brick-mortar companies will be affected. The investors trade in the consumer consumable sector so focusing on stores that sell groceries, drugs etc. is good.
3. LuLu Lemon's management is telling us that most of their clothes are sold at full price and they rarely discount. We want to know if this is true.

The 30-minute presentation will be given in a live setting and you will be scored on:

1. Comprehensiveness and uniqueness of the data you find and present (30pts)
2. Thoughts or ideas on the source’s data lineage. Can it be trusted? What are the potential problems with the data? (10pts)
3. Intelligent design plans for how best to collect the data (ajax,apis, vendor solutions) (20pts)
4. Data quality, cleaning and accuracy detection. How would you ensure the data is correct, every day we use it? (15pts)
5. Outcomes or live demos (5pts)
6. Clear and succinct presentation (20pts)