AIG · Data Scientist
Updated · 2026-09-24

AIG Data Scientist
Interview Questions & Guide 2026

THE 60-SECOND BRIEF

As a Data Scientist at AIG, you are at the forefront of a major technological transformation within one of the world's leading global insurance organizations. You will be joining a brand-new, highly visible Generative AI team designed to explore and scale artificial intelligence applications across the insurance lifecycle and beyond. This role is not just about building models in isolation; it is about reshaping how a company operating in 190 countries manages risk, serves customers, and innovates for the future.

Seniority shifts the scope more than the words in the title do. Earlier-career loops mostly check that you execute a well-posed analysis correctly; senior loops check that you can decide which question is worth answering and defend what you chose not to do.

PracHub has no confirmed round sequence for AIG. Treat the sections below as preparation areas and confirm the format with your recruiter.

Decompose a metric move by segment and mixSeparate novelty effects from durable behaviour changePick a randomisation unit that respects interference

30 min read

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See the practice prompts

13Practice promptsAcross five skill areas
3With worked solutionsIncluded in the practice prompts

As a Data Scientist at AIG, you are at the forefront of a major technological transformation within one of the world's leading global insurance organizations. You will be joining a brand-new, highly visible Generative AI team designed to explore and scale artificial intelligence applications across the insurance lifecycle and beyond. This role is not just about building models in isolation; it is about reshaping how a company operating in 190 countries manages risk, serves customers, and innovates for the future.

Your work will directly impact AIG’s core business offerings by integrating best-in-class engineering and product management principles with cutting-edge AI. You will be tasked with solving complex business challenges by building and scaling world-class products. Because this team is central to the company's long-term vision, your technical guidance and collaborative spirit will be critical in setting new industry standards for smarter, more efficient, and highly personalized insurance solutions.

Expect a role that balances deep technical rigor with strategic business impact. You will be given the resources and investment needed to explore new frontiers in generative AI, but you will also be expected to navigate the ethical and regulatory standards inherent to the financial services industry. If you are excited by the prospect of taking end-to-end ownership of AI initiatives—from conceptualization to operational rollout—this role offers a unique platform to grow your career and shape the future of risk management.

01

Preparation focus

editorial

No round sequence has been reported for this company, so work the categories below and confirm the format with your recruiter.

What to demonstrate

  • Breadth across SQL, experimentation and product reasoning
  • Ability to state assumptions before choosing a method

How to prepare

  • Drill the practice exercises below and time yourself
  • Prepare three quantified stories about decisions you drove
PracHub interview preparation framework ↗

PracHub editorial advice for the preparation topics above.

01

Watching an experiment daily and stopping when it crosses significance

A fixed-sample test controls type I error at one pre-declared look. Checking repeatedly and stopping at the first p < 0.05 inflates the false positive rate to roughly 0.15 to 0.20 for ten looks, and it rises further with more frequent checks, because the p-value takes a random walk that will eventually dip below the threshold under the null. The usual defences are a fixed horizon declared before launch, group-sequential boundaries such as O'Brien-Fleming that spend alpha across a planned number of looks, or always-valid confidence sequences that are correct under continuous monitoring. Compounding it, the effect size reported conditional on having crossed the threshold is biased away from zero, and the bias is larger the lower the power was, so an underpowered test that 'won' typically overstates the lift it found.

02

Treating last-touch attribution as the causal value of a channel

The attribution label on dim_user is the output of a rule that assigns full credit to whichever touch happened to be recorded last inside a lookback window, and that rule systematically rewards channels that sit close to the conversion, especially branded search and retargeting, which largely intercept demand that already existed. Reallocating spend on those labels moves budget toward the channels that are best at being last, which is why attributed return on ad spend often improves while total signups do not. Nothing in the touchpoint data can settle this, because the counterfactual of not running the channel was never observed. The credible reads are a geo holdout or a scheduled pause, sized in advance on the total-signups metric rather than on the attributed one, and the honest framing in the meantime is that the label describes correlation with conversion and not incremental contribution.

03

SQL that silently fans out on a one-to-many join

State the grain of each table and the grain you want in the result before writing the join. Pre-aggregate the many side to the join key, or use EXISTS or a window function, and verify with a row count against COUNT(DISTINCT id) rather than trusting that the numbers look plausible.

04

Writing SQL without stating NULL and tie-breaking behaviour

Before calling a query finished, say what it does with NULLs, ties and empty groups. NOT IN against a subquery containing a single NULL returns no rows at all, and RANK, DENSE_RANK and ROW_NUMBER differ precisely on ties, so name which one the question requires.

Choose a category, try a prompt, then open its approach, worked solution or follow-up when you need it.

10 technical prompts3 include a worked solution

What are the key architectural differences between a transformer model…

medium
machine learning and modelling

What are the key architectural differences between a transformer model and a traditional RNN for natural language understanding?

Approach
  1. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
  2. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
  3. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
Follow-up
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?
  • How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?

Implement seven-day activation from its written definition

medium
metric definitioncohortspandasjoins

Implement the seven-day activation rate. Inputs: dim_user with user_id, account_created_at_utc and is_internal; fct_event with user_id, occurred_at_utc and is_core_action. A user activates when core-action events carrying a non-NULL user_id fall on at least two distinct UTC dates inside [account_created_at_utc, account_created_at_utc + 7 days). The denominator is every non-internal user whose account_created_at_utc lands in the cohort week, including users with no events at all. Return one row per cohort week with numerator, denominator and rate, publishing only weeks whose last signup is at least eight days old.

Approach
  1. Build the denominator first, from dim_user alone, filtered on is_internal = False. Deriving it from the join is the standard way to lose every user who never fired an event, which is exactly the population the metric is about.
  2. Join events to users on user_id with a left join from the user side, then apply the window as a half-open interval: occurred_at >= created AND occurred_at < created + 7 days. The right bound is exclusive, so an event at exactly created + 7 days does not count.
  3. Count distinct UTC dates per user, not distinct events. Floor occurred_at_utc to date before the nunique, and do it in UTC rather than local time so the threshold does not move with the user's country.
  4. Apply the >= 2 threshold, aggregate to cohort week, and compute the rate by re-summing numerator and denominator per week rather than averaging any per-user or per-day rate. Fix the week anchor explicitly: cohort_week is the Monday of the signup week in UTC, which is what Postgres DATE_TRUNC('week') returns and what any SQL version of this metric will produce. In pandas, subtract dt.weekday days from the floored timestamp. If you reach for periods instead, the anchor that matches is to_period('W') (equivalently 'W-SUN'), whose weeks end Sunday and therefore start Monday; to_period('W-MON') labels weeks that end on Monday, so it runs Tuesday through Monday and its start_time is a Tuesday. Mixing the two shifts every cohort label by one day and silently moves Mondays into the previous week.
  5. Suppress immature weeks: drop any cohort week whose maximum account_created_at_utc is within 8 days of the data cut, and return them as absent rather than as a partial number.
Follow-up
  • The threshold is 2 distinct days. What changes in the reported history if someone moves it to 3, and how would you publish that change?
  • Invited seats and SSO-provisioned users have no pre-signup session. Should they be in this denominator at all, and what does including them do to the rate for sales-assisted accounts?
  • How would you produce the same metric at account grain, and which of the two would you put on the dashboard?

Rebuild per-visitor ordering without groupby convenience methods

easyWorked solution
pandasvectorisationwindow logic

You have a DataFrame of 2 million fct_event rows with visitor_id, occurred_at_utc and event_id, unsorted and containing duplicate timestamps within a visitor. Produce three new columns: event_rank, the 1-based position of the event within its visitor ordered by occurred_at_utc; seconds_since_prev, the gap to that visitor's previous event, NULL for the first; and is_first_for_visitor. You may use sort_values, shift, cumsum, numpy and boolean masking. You may not use groupby.transform, groupby.apply, groupby.cumcount, groupby.rank or merge_asof. Break timestamp ties on event_id.

Approach
  1. Sort once by ['visitor_id', 'occurred_at_utc', 'event_id'] and reset the index. The whole exercise reduces to row arithmetic on a sorted frame, and the tiebreak on event_id is what makes the result reproducible across runs.
  2. Mark visitor boundaries with is_first = df['visitor_id'].ne(df['visitor_id'].shift()). This is the single fact every other column derives from.
  3. Compute seconds_since_prev as the diff of the timestamp column, then overwrite it with NaT/NaN wherever is_first is True. The shift crosses the boundary between visitors and will otherwise hand the first row of each visitor the last event of the previous one.
  4. Build event_rank from a running counter that resets at boundaries: take a global cumulative position (np.arange(len(df))) and subtract, per row, the global position at which that visitor started. Get the start position by forward-filling the positions where is_first is True, which is a cumsum-free reset and is O(n).
  5. Verify against the forbidden method once, as a test rather than as the implementation, and confirm the two agree on every row.
Worked solution 20 min
  1. Sort on the three-key tuple and reset_index(drop=True).
  2. Compute is_first via .ne(.shift()), which is True for row 0 because the shifted value is NaN.
  3. pos = np.arange(len(df)); start = pd.Series(np.where(is_first, pos, np.nan)).ffill(); event_rank = (pos - start + 1).astype(int).
  4. gap = df['occurred_at_utc'].diff().dt.total_seconds(); gap[is_first] = np.nan.
  5. Assert event_rank equals df.groupby('visitor_id').cumcount() + 1 on the sorted frame.
EXPECTED RESULTThree columns on the sorted frame: event_rank starting at 1 for every visitor and increasing by 1 with no gaps, seconds_since_prev null exactly where is_first_for_visitor is True, and is_first_for_visitor summing to df['visitor_id'].nunique().
Follow-up
  • The frame does not fit in memory. How does your approach change if you can only process one visitor-partitioned chunk at a time?
  • occurred_at_utc is client-supplied and sometimes runs backwards within a visitor. Does your seconds_since_prev go negative, and should it?
  • How would you extend this to reset the counter at every change of surface as well as visitor?

Four days spend equal time on query work, statistics, modelling and product judgement at deliberately shallow depth, which produces a scored map of where you actually stand. The last three days spend everything on the two areas the role weights most, and close by re-running day one to measure movement.

Small steps. Visible outcomes.0 / 7 completed
ONE WEEK · YOUR PACE

Prepare, practise & reflect

One practical outcome each day. Spend longer where you need it.

0 / 7 done
01Breadth pass: query fluency
  • Solve six prompts spanning aggregation, joins, window functions and date arithmetic in 60 minutes total, stopping at 10 minutes each whether or not it works, and mark every prompt as solved, solved slowly, or stuck.
  • For each unsolved prompt write the single blocking sentence (I lost the grain, I did not know the frame clause, I could not express the date boundary) instead of reading the solution.
  • Translate one pandas transformation you know well into SQL and one SQL query into pandas, checking that both return the same row count and the same totals.

Deliverable: A scored six-row table, one line per prompt, saved for the day-seven re-run.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗
02Breadth pass: statistics and inference
  • Answer ten short questions in writing with nothing open: what a p-value is conditional on, what a 95 percent interval covers across repeated samples, when a paired test is the right one, what the bootstrap estimates, why multiple comparisons inflate false positives, how controlling the family-wise error rate differs from controlling the false discovery rate, what power depends on, what a missed real effect costs a product, the three situations where the central limit theorem does not rescue you (small n, very heavy tails, dependent observations), and what a standard error is the standard deviation of.
  • Grade yourself against a reference and count only the answers that were exactly right, not the ones that were nearly right.
  • Rewrite the two weakest answers the following morning from memory in full sentences.

Deliverable: Ten graded answers with an honest count of exact hits.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
03Breadth pass: modelling
  • Take one tabular dataset end to end in 90 minutes: a leakage-safe split, a baseline that is not a model (majority class or historical mean), one regularized linear model, one gradient-boosted tree, and a single evaluation metric chosen before you look at any result.
  • Write why that metric fits the cost structure: precision at a fixed recall for alerting, calibration for anything feeding a price or a threshold, ranking metrics for retrieval, and note that area under the ROC curve is insensitive to class balance in a way that can flatter a rare-positive problem.
  • Name the leak you were most likely to introduce (an encoding fit on all rows before splitting, or a feature computed after the label's timestamp) and write the check that would have caught it.

Deliverable: A notebook whose first cell states the metric and the baseline, plus two lines on what beat what and by how much.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
04Breadth pass: product judgement
  • Answer three case prompts aloud at 15 minutes each, timing how long passes before you state a success metric.
  • For one case write the first segmentation you would run and the row counts you expect per segment, so that a tiny segment cannot quietly drive the conclusion.
  • Take a metric definition you did not write, from a public dashboard, a textbook, or documentation you already have open, and list every place two analysts implementing it would diverge: which rows the denominator admits, whether the unit is an account or a person, what the time window is anchored to, and what happens to data that arrives late. Then write the one question that would close the largest of those gaps.

Deliverable: Three recorded case answers plus an ambiguity list for a metric someone else defined, ending in the single question you would ask about it.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗
05Depth, first area
  • Rank the four areas by how many bullet points in the role description each one covers, pick the top one, and spend the entire day inside it.
  • Work the six hardest problems you can find in that area and for each write the generalizable move you should have reached for first, rather than the answer.
  • Re-solve the two you failed the same evening with notes closed.

Deliverable: Six generalizable moves written as instructions to yourself, not as solutions.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
06Depth, second area, and the seam between them
  • Repeat the depth protocol on the second-ranked area with the same six-problem structure.
  • Construct one problem that requires both areas at once, for example a metric redefinition whose effect you must validate with a test whose readout you then have to query.
  • Solve your own combined problem end to end and note where the handoff between the two areas cost you time.

Deliverable: One combined problem, solved end to end, with the handoff failure written down.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
07Integration and re-measurement
  • Re-run the six prompts from day one under the same clock and compare both correctness and time.
  • Run a 60-minute mixed mock that moves between areas without warning, since switching cost is what breadth passes do not train.
  • Write the two areas you would still fail on, and the sentence you will use in the interview when you hit one of them.

Deliverable: A before-and-after score table plus a written plan for the two remaining gaps.

Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗

Expand any day for tasks and deliverables. Your progress is saved on this device.

Sometimes the honest read is that the initiative did not work, and the person who commissioned the analysis was hoping otherwise. Interviewers want to know whether you softened it. Prepare the case where you delivered an unwelcome result, how you presented the uncertainty without hiding behind it, and what the team did next.

Describe your experience with LangChain. How have you used it to orche…

medium
behavioural and stakeholder questions

Describe your experience with LangChain. How have you used it to orchestrate complex LLM workflows?

Approach
  1. Quantify the outcome, including what you would not claim credit for.
  2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on your reasoning.
  3. Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
Follow-up
  • What would you do differently if you ran that project again?
  • What did you decide not to do, and why?

Quantify your own impact without claiming the topline you touched

hard
self-assessmentattributioncommunication

You are writing the impact section of your own review. Over the year you ran four experiments, one of which shipped and three of which were flat; you corrected the definition of gross monthly revenue churn so that cancellation is recognised at period_end_utc; and you built a self-serve funnel dashboard. Weekly active accounts rose 14% over the same period. Your reviewer knows the data well. Write the three impact claims you would defend, stating for each what you contributed, what evidence supports it, and what portion of the outcome you are not claiming.

Approach
  1. Recognise what is being probed: whether you apply to your own work the causal standard you would apply to somebody else's roadmap claim. Nearly everyone who would reject 'accounts that do Y retain better' will write 'I drove a 14% increase' without noticing it is the same error with a friendlier subject.
  2. Sort the work by the kind of evidence it can carry. The shipped experiment is the only item with a randomised estimate, so it is the only one where an effect size is defensible, and you claim the interval rather than the point estimate.
  3. Claim the three flat experiments as decisions prevented and price them. Features not built, or built differently, on evidence, with the engineering weeks reallocated as the number somebody else can verify. A defensible null is a delivered decision and should be written as one.
  4. Claim the definition fix as correctness, not as improvement. The old figure was overstated by a specific percentage and appeared in a specific set of recurring documents; the impact is the change it produced in the forecast built on top of it, not a change in churn itself.
  5. Claim the dashboard on usage and displacement: distinct weekly users of it, and the ad-hoc request count for six months before against six months after. If the request log does not exist, record the claim as unverified rather than estimating it upward.
  6. Disclaim the 14% explicitly and once. State that it cannot be separated from seasonality, other teams' launches and a pricing change, and bound your own contribution from above using the shipped experiment's interval converted into headline units.
Follow-up
  • Your shipped experiment's interval was +0.2pp to +1.4pp on activation. How much of the 14% can that account for, and how do you say so without undercutting yourself?
  • A peer in the same cycle claims the full 14%. What, if anything, do you do about it?
  • If you could only keep two of your three claims, which do you drop, and why that one?

Handle a request for numbers supporting a decision already made

hard
integrityframingstakeholder

A senior leader has already decided to sunset a plan tier and asks you for the analysis showing it is the right call. Accounts on that tier carry 6% of MRR at constant FX and have the highest licensed-seat utilisation in the book. The leader's support matters to your next review cycle, and the decision is being presented in four days. Deliver what you produce, what you decline to produce, and the exact sentence you will say in the meeting where the number appears on a slide.

Approach
  1. Recognise what is being probed: whether you can find the legitimate request inside an illegitimate framing instead of either complying or refusing on principle. The generic answer promises to push back; the strong one produces something genuinely useful and states its limits in the room, without ambushing anybody.
  2. Separate the decision from the justification. Sunsetting the tier may be correct for reasons the data does not hold, such as support cost, roadmap surface area or sales motion. What you decline is a one-sided document. What you produce is the case read both ways, which also happens to be more useful to the leader.
  3. Build the symmetric analysis: MRR at risk at constant FX, the share of affected accounts with a plausible migration path given seats_licensed and billing_term, the recovery rate assumed for that migration and where it came from, and the downside case in which high-utilisation accounts treat the sunset as a reason to re-evaluate the vendor entirely.
  4. Surface the inconvenient fact privately and early. The highest seat utilisation in the book is a retention signal, and the leader should hold it before the room does, so they can incorporate it rather than be caught by it.
  5. Agree the meeting sentence in advance with the leader, so that nobody is surprised. Something to the effect that the tier is 6% of MRR and its accounts are the most heavily used in the book, and that the case for sunsetting rests on cost and focus rather than on revenue. That is true, it supports the decision on its real grounds, and it stops the deck claiming the numbers endorse it.
  6. Decide your own line before you need it: what you will not put your name to, and that the route if asked anyway is your own manager rather than a confrontation in the meeting.
Follow-up
  • The deck circulates with your analysis included and the downside case removed. What do you do, and by when?
  • What changes if the honest analysis says the sunset is clearly the wrong call?
  • How do you write the same memo when the leader is your skip-level and the meeting is tomorrow?
  • 01

    Describe your experience with LangChain. How have you used it to orchestrate complex LLM workflows?

  • 02

    You are writing the impact section of your own review. Over the year you ran four experiments, one of which shipped and three of which were flat; you corrected the definition of gross monthly revenue churn so that cancellation is recognised at period_end_utc; and you built a self-serve funnel dashboard. Weekly active accounts rose 14% over the same period. Your reviewer knows the data well. Write the three impact claims you would defend, stating for each what you contributed, what evidence supports it, and what portion of the outcome you are not claiming.

  • 03

    A senior leader has already decided to sunset a plan tier and asks you for the analysis showing it is the right call. Accounts on that tier carry 6% of MRR at constant FX and have the highest licensed-seat utilisation in the book. The leader's support matters to your next review cycle, and the decision is being presented in four days. Deliver what you produce, what you decline to produce, and the exact sentence you will say in the meeting where the number appears on a slide.

PracHub interview preparation framework ↗
Is this an official AIG interview guide?

No. It is PracHub's own research and practice material for the Data Scientist role at AIG. Rounds and questions reflect what candidates have reported, not a process AIG has published, and they change over time. Confirm the current format and scope with your recruiter.

PracHub interview research ↗
How technically rigorous is the interview process for this GenAI role?

The process is highly rigorous, particularly in the areas of deep learning architectures, RAG implementation, and data engineering. You will be expected to write real code and discuss the mathematical underpinnings of models like VAEs and GANs. Preparation should balance theoretical knowledge with practical implementation skills.

PracHub interview research ↗
Do I really need strong PySpark skills if my focus is on modeling?

Yes. AIG expects its Data Scientists to be end-to-end practitioners. You will be responsible for getting hands-on with data engineering to feed your models, and PySpark is a critical tool for handling the massive scale of enterprise insurance data.

PracHub interview research ↗
What is the working culture like for this team?

AIG places a high value on in-person collaboration, meaning you should expect to work primarily from the office (e.g., in Atlanta). The culture on this specific team is described as a "startup within an enterprise," offering the resources of a global corporation but the innovative, fast-paced environment of a newly formed tech group. Work-life balance is generally highly respected across the company.

PracHub interview research ↗
Sources & methodology 3 sources ↗

No official company page is cited. Rounds and questions come from candidate reports and PracHub editorial material; each source shows the date it was read.