A Data Scientist at BigHat Biosciences sits at the intersection of cutting-edge machine learning and advanced protein engineering. You are not just building models; you are accelerating the design of high-quality therapeutic antibodies. Your work directly influences how the company navigates the vast search space of protein sequences to identify molecules with optimized properties, essentially bridging the gap between computational prediction and wet-lab validation.
This role is critical because the success of the BigHat Biosciences platform hinges on the accuracy and interpretability of your models. You will be expected to handle complex, noisy biological data and translate it into actionable engineering insights. It is a high-impact position that requires a unique blend of technical rigor and a willingness to engage deeply with the biological context of the problems you are solving.
Candidates report that the team highly values individuals who can demonstrate a genuine interest in the intersection of data science and protein engineering, even if their background is primarily computational.
Preparation focus
editorialNo 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 editorial advice for the preparation topics above.
Ignoring clustering by provider, facility, or site
Patients within a provider panel, and subjects within a trial site, are correlated on both case mix and practice pattern. Standard errors computed as if observations were independent are too narrow by roughly the design effect, 1 + (m - 1) * ICC, where m is the average cluster size. With 50 patients per provider and an intracluster correlation of only 0.02, variance is understated by about a factor of two, which manufactures significant provider differences out of noise. Cluster-robust errors or a random intercept per provider, and cluster-level randomisation when you design the test, are the corrections.
Pre-post evaluation on a high-cost or high-risk cohort
Cohorts selected on an extreme value of the outcome regress toward the mean on their own. Members identified as the top 1 percent of spend in one year spend far less the next, whether or not anyone intervenes, because the selecting year captured both chronic severity and one-off events. A pre-post design on such a cohort will report savings every time. A concurrent comparison group selected by the same rule in the same period, or a regression discontinuity at the selection threshold, is the minimum credible design.
Generalising beyond the population the sample actually supports
State the frame the sample was drawn from and where it diverges from the population you want to talk about: time window, platform, geography, opt-in. If a group is excluded from the frame, either weight to known margins or narrow the claim rather than quietly extending it.
Naming a model class before naming the deployment constraints
Set out the latency budget, the label delay, the retraining cadence, the interpretability requirement and the number of labelled examples, then pick the model that fits them. A boosted-tree answer to a problem where each decision must be explained to the affected user is a well-executed answer to the wrong question.
Choose a category, try a prompt, then open its approach, worked solution or follow-up when you need it.
How would you approach a situation where your training data is highly …
How would you approach a situation where your training data is highly imbalanced?
Approach
- Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
- Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
- Frame the prediction: the label, the moment of prediction, and the action it triggers.
Follow-up
- Where could label leakage enter this setup?
- How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?
How would you evaluate the performance of a model designed to predict …
How would you evaluate the performance of a model designed to predict protein binding affinity?
Approach
- Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
- Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
- Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
Follow-up
- How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?
- What would you monitor after launch to know the model is still valid?
Proportion of days covered with shifted, truncated refill intervals
pharmacy_claim has fill_id, member_id, therapeutic_class_code, fill_date, days_supply, reversal_flag, reversed_fill_id. For one therapeutic class and a fixed 12-month window, compute proportion of days covered per member: distinct days on which a dispensed days_supply covers the day, divided by days from the member's first in-window fill through the window end. An early refill shifts coverage forward rather than stacking, and coverage is truncated at the window end. Drop both rows of every reversed pair. Return member_id, pdc, and the share at pdc >= 0.80 among members with at least 2 fills and at least 91 days of follow-up.
Approach
- Remove reversals as pairs first. Drop every row with reversal_flag true, and also drop the fill_ids those rows point at through reversed_fill_id. Dropping only the flagged row leaves a dispense that was never collected in the exposure.
- Walk fills per member in fill_date order carrying a cursor: start = max(fill_date, previous_end + 1 day), end = start + days_supply - 1. The shift is path dependent, so a plain cumsum over days_supply does not reproduce it. Use itertools.accumulate or a per-member loop over numpy arrays, not a row-wise apply over the whole frame.
- Truncate the last interval at the window end before measuring. Without truncation a 90-day fill dispensed on the final day pushes the covered-day count past the denominator and PDC above 1.0.
- Use the denominator the definition states: first in-window fill_date through window end, inclusive. Not a flat 365, and not first fill to last fill, which is a different metric that rewards early discontinuation.
- Apply the eligibility filter before computing the >= 0.80 share, and report the size of that denominator next to the share. A share without its denominator is not reviewable.
Worked solution 40 min
- Filter to the therapeutic class and the window, then remove reversed pairs by dropping flagged rows and the fill_ids in reversed_fill_id.
- Sort by member_id, fill_date. Per member, accumulate start = max(fill_date, prior_end + 1 day) and end = start + days_supply - 1.
- Clip every interval's end at the window end and drop intervals whose start is past it.
- Covered days per member = sum of (end - start + 1) over the shifted intervals, which are disjoint by construction.
- Denominator = (window_end - first_fill_date).days + 1. Divide, then filter to members with >= 2 fills and denominator >= 91 and compute the share at or above 0.80.
Follow-up
- How does PDC differ from medication possession ratio, and which of the two can exceed 1.0?
- A member switches to a different ingredient inside the same therapeutic class mid-window. Should the intervals chain, and what does that do to the class-level number?
- Members who die or lose coverage mid-window get a short denominator and often a high PDC. If you then compare mortality by adherence category, what bias have you built in and how do you remove it?
Reconstruct drug coverage intervals and compute proportion of days covered
pharmacy_claim holds fill_id, member_id, ndc_code, therapeutic_class_code, fill_date, days_supply, reversal_flag and reversed_fill_id. Early refills overlap, so days_supply must be laid end to end: each fill's coverage starts at the later of its fill_date and the previous interval's end. Both rows of a reversed pair are excluded. For one therapeutic_class_code over 2025-01-01 to 2025-06-30, return per member the proportion of days covered, defined as covered days divided by days from first fill_date to window end, plus the share of members at or above 0.80. Require at least two fills and 91 days of follow-up.
Approach
- Clean the fills first. Drop rows with reversal_flag TRUE and also the fills they point at through reversed_fill_id. Dropping only the reversal row leaves an original fill counted as exposure that never reached the member. Use NOT EXISTS for that second step, since reversed_fill_id is nullable and NOT IN would return nothing.
- Shift, never stack. The shifted end is covered_end_i = GREATEST(fill_date_i, covered_end_{i-1}) + days_supply_i, which looks recursive but has a closed form: with cum_i the running sum of days_supply through fill i, covered_end_i = cum_i + MAX over j <= i of (fill_date_j - cum_{j-1}). That is SUM(days_supply) OVER (ORDER BY fill_date ROWS UNBOUNDED PRECEDING) plus a running MAX of an anchor column, so it is two window functions and no recursive CTE.
- Derive covered_start_i as GREATEST(fill_date_i, LAG(covered_end)). The intervals are disjoint by construction, so covered days is a plain sum of lengths and never needs a distinct day grid.
- Clip intervals to the window end before summing, and decide explicitly whether to clip at disenrollment as well. Supply that runs past the window must not inflate the numerator.
- Use the denominator the spec names, first fill_date to window end, and hold it constant across classes. A fixed-window denominator yields a different and usually lower number, and mixing the two across classes makes the comparison meaningless.
- Apply the inclusion rules at member level after the intervals are built, then compute the share at or above 0.80 with the qualifying member count beside it.
Worked solution 40 min
- Filter to the therapeutic_class_code and window, then remove reversal rows and their originals with NOT EXISTS.
- Per member ordered by fill_date, compute cum_supply and anchor = fill_date - (cum_supply - days_supply), then covered_end = cum_supply + MAX(anchor) OVER (ORDER BY fill_date ROWS UNBOUNDED PRECEDING).
- Compute covered_start = GREATEST(fill_date, LAG(covered_end) OVER (ORDER BY fill_date)), clip both ends to the window, and drop intervals that collapse.
- Sum interval lengths as covered_days, compute follow_up_days from first fill_date to window end, and divide.
- Apply the two-fill and 91-day rules, then aggregate the share at or above 0.80.
Follow-up
- A member is hospitalised for twelve days mid-window, when the facility supplies medication. Should those days count as covered, and what do published adherence measures do about them?
- Someone wants to classify adherence over twelve months and then compare mortality from month zero. What is wrong with that design and what fixes it?
- Two different ndc_codes in the same therapeutic class overlap. Is that stacking or switching, and how does your interval logic treat each case?
Report site activation to first randomization without hiding non-enrollers
study_site holds one row per (study_id, site_id): site_activation_date, which is NULL for a site selected but never activated, and site_status. study_subject_visit holds subject_visit_id, study_id, site_id, subject_id, randomization_ts (NULL for screen failures), visit_name, visit_number, actual_visit_date and visit_status, with one row per subject per protocol visit, so randomization_ts repeats across every visit of a randomized subject and a site that has screened nobody has no rows there at all. For one study_id and a stated data cut date, return per activated site the activation date, the first randomization_ts and the days between them, with activated sites that have randomized nobody still present. Add a study-level summary giving median days to first randomization and the share of activated sites with no randomization by day 90.
Approach
- Take the site universe from study_site, never from study_subject_visit. The visit table can only contain sites that have screened at least one subject, so a universe built from DISTINCT site_id there omits exactly the sites this metric exists to expose. Filter study_site to the study and to site_activation_date IS NOT NULL, then LEFT JOIN the per-site first randomization.
- Collapse the grain before aggregating anything on the visit side. The table repeats randomization_ts across every visit of a randomized subject, so any count taken at row grain is inflated by visits per subject. MIN(randomization_ts) per site is safe, COUNT is not.
- State the date boundary rule. randomization_ts is a timestamp and site_activation_date is a date, so a randomization at 23:40 local time can land on either side of a day boundary depending on the zone the timestamp is stored in. Cast once, deliberately, and say which zone.
- Use PERCENTILE_CONT(0.5) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY days) for the median and be explicit that it ignores NULLs, so it is a median over enrolling sites only. That is exactly why the non-enroller share is reported beside it rather than instead of it.
- Censor the day-90 denominator against the data cut. A site activated 40 days before the cut has not had 90 days to randomize, so it cannot be scored on that bar and belongs outside that denominator.
Follow-up
- The same site_id appears under two studies. What breaks, and what is the correct grain for this metric?
- Would you present this as a median, as a Kaplan-Meier curve of time to first randomization, or both, and what does the curve show that the median cannot?
- A site randomized one subject who withdrew at visit 2. Does that site count as enrolling here, and how does that differ from a randomized-and-retained measure?
What are the trade-offs between different protein sequence representat…
What are the trade-offs between different protein sequence representation methods?
Approach
- Name one primary metric, then the guardrail that stops it being gamed.
- Decompose the metric into the rates that drive it, and say which one you would check first.
- Restate the decision this analysis has to support, and who acts on the answer.
Follow-up
- How would you detect that the metric is being gamed rather than genuinely improving?
- What would you do if the primary metric and the guardrail moved in opposite directions?
Explain the difference between generative and discriminative models in…
Explain the difference between generative and discriminative models in the context of protein design.
Approach
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the decision backwards to the evidence you would need.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
Propose a proxy for care that never happened
Leadership asks for a metric for unmet need: care a member should have received and did not. Claims record billing events, so no claim and no need look identical in the data. Using member_enrollment, medical_claim_line, encounter, lab_result and pharmacy_claim, propose the best available proxy, state the direction of its bias and what drives the magnitude, and name one decision the proxy is good enough to support and one it is not. Say plainly whether the quantity itself is identified by this data.
Approach
- Start by refusing the direct metric and saying why in one sentence: every table here records an action someone took and billed for, so the absence of a row is the absence of a billed action, and no combination of these tables distinguishes a member who needed nothing from a member nobody reached. The quantity is not identified.
- Build the proxy only where non-treatment leaves a downstream trace. Two families work: ambulatory care sensitive admissions per 1,000 member-years, where an inpatient stay for short-term diabetes complications, heart failure, adult asthma, bacterial pneumonia or urinary infection implies outpatient care that did not land; and guideline gap measures on an identified cohort, for example members with a qualifying diagnosis on at least two medical_claim_line rows at least 30 days apart, continuously enrolled, with no matching lab_result loinc_code and no matching procedure_code in the last 12 months.
- State the bias direction without hedging. Both families require prior contact: a gap measure needs a diagnosis, which needs someone to have coded it, and an admission needs the member to reach a facility. The proxy therefore undercounts unmet need, and it undercounts it most in exactly the population that has the most of it, namely members with no contact at all.
- Name the magnitude drivers so the number can be read over time: coverage churn (short spans fail continuous-enrolment filters and drop out of the denominator), coding intensity (more diagnosis coding enlarges the identified cohort and can raise measured gaps with no change in care), and site-level ordering habits in lab_result, since a test exists because somebody chose to order it.
- Pair it with a denominator-side companion that moves the opposite way: the count and share of continuously enrolled members with zero claims of any kind in 12 months. Reporting it beside every unmet-need number blocks the improvement that comes from losing the least-observed members.
- Close with the usability boundary: the proxy supports relative prioritisation of outreach across panels within the same product and region, where the bias is shared; it does not support a year-over-year claim that unmet need fell, because churn and coding intensity move the proxy on their own.
Worked solution 40 min
- Write the identification argument in three sentences: what generates rows in each table, what a missing row can mean, and why no filter separates the two meanings.
- Specify one gap measure end to end: cohort definition with the two-claims-30-days-apart rule, continuous-enrolment requirement with the allowable gap in days, the expected event defined by loinc_code in lab_result or procedure_code in medical_claim_line, and the 12-month window.
- Specify the ambulatory care sensitive admission rate per 1,000 member-years from encounter and member_enrollment, with the diagnosis list named and planned admissions excluded.
- Write the bias paragraph: direction, the three magnitude drivers, and the specific scenario in which the proxy improves while care worsens.
- Define the zero-utiliser companion metric and state that it is published on the same page as the proxy, not in an appendix.
- Write the two-line usability boundary naming the one decision it supports and the one it does not.
Follow-up
- Your gap measure improves 3 points year over year and the zero-utiliser share rose 1.5 points. What do you tell leadership?
- Would adding the presence indicator for lab orders as a model feature help or hurt, and what happens when that model is deployed at a site with different ordering protocols?
- What data outside these five tables would actually identify unmet need, and what would it cost to get it?
Adherence share collapsed the month a feed was added
The share of members with proportion of days covered at or above 0.80 in one therapeutic class fell from 0.71 to 0.58 in a single month. pharmacy_claim carries fill_id, member_id, ndc_code, therapeutic_class_code, fill_date, days_supply, quantity_dispensed, refill_number, reversal_flag, reversed_fill_id and source_system_code. There is no person-level key above member_id and no enrollment table on hand, so every diagnostic has to run on pharmacy_claim alone. That month the pipeline began ingesting a second pharmacy source. Determine whether adherence actually changed, and hand back a PDC query you would defend line by line.
Approach
- Compute controls that depend on neither member identity nor the PDC code: total fills in the class per month, and total days_supply dispensed in the class per month. Both are sums over rows, so neither moves when one person's fills split across two member_ids, which is exactly what a per-member control cannot promise. If both are flat while PDC falls, no dispensing behaviour changed and the computation or the keys did.
- Check days_supply for nulls and zeros by source_system_code. If the new source omits days_supply and the code coalesces null to zero, covered days vanish and PDC falls even though the fills are there.
- Check for member identity splitting using the columns you actually have. There is no person key above member_id, so the split has to be found by its footprint: distinct member_id in the class jumping at the break while total fills stay flat, and a rise in the share of member_ids whose earliest fill for a given ndc_code carries refill_number above zero, which is a continuation history that lost its beginning. When one person is split, each id may fall below the two-fill denominator requirement and drop out, and the ids that do survive carry artificial gaps.
- Check reversals. A reversed fill is two rows, the fill and a row with reversal_flag TRUE pointing at reversed_fill_id, and both must be excluded from exposure. If the new source expresses reversals differently and reversed_fill_id does not link, phantom coverage appears, which pushes PDC up rather than down, so use this to rule the cause in or out.
- Verify the denominator and window are unchanged: members with at least two fills in the class and at least 91 days of follow-up, over a stated fixed 12-month window, never a mixture of window lengths.
- Write the PDC query so overlapping refills shift the next interval's start to the later of fill_date and the prior interval's end, so a day is covered at most once, and cap at one day per calendar day.
Follow-up
- Why is PDC preferred to medication possession ratio when early refills are common?
- You want to compare adherent and non-adherent members on hospitalisation. What is wrong with classifying on a 12-month PDC and then following from day zero?
- A member switches to a different drug in the same class mid-year. How does your interval logic handle that, and is the class the right grain?
For a candidate whose interviews will centre on A/B testing, metric movement and causal claims. Design comes before arithmetic, arithmetic before analysis, and the week ends by rehearsing the readout rather than the derivation.
Prepare, practise & reflect
One practical outcome each day. Spend longer where you need it.
0 / 7 done01Design one test end to end on paper
- Take a single feature change and write the full design: randomization unit, the exact point of exposure, the primary metric with its grain, guardrails, allocation, planned duration, and the decision rule committed before any data exists.
- Write why the randomization unit must sit at or above the level where treatment can spill over, and give one case where user-level randomization is still contaminated (shared accounts or devices, or two participants in the same marketplace).
- State in advance what you will do if the primary metric is flat while a secondary metric is significant.
Deliverable: A one-page test design with a decision rule written before launch.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗02Power arithmetic until it is automatic
- Compute required sample size per arm for a binary metric with the normal approximation, n is approximately 2 times (z for alpha/2 plus z for power) squared times p(1 minus p) divided by delta squared, for baselines of 2, 10 and 40 percent at a 5 percent relative lift, and note that for a fixed relative lift the requirement falls as the baseline rises because delta grows proportionally with p.
- Redo the calculation for a continuous metric using variance in place of p(1 minus p), and show why a heavy-tailed quantity such as revenue per user needs either far more traffic or a capped version with a stated cap.
- Convert one of the results into weeks given a weekly eligible traffic figure, then list the two honest ways to shorten it (accept a larger detectable effect, or reduce variance) and write why quietly lowering the power target is a decision to miss more real wins, not a speedup.
Deliverable: A small script or sheet that maps baseline, minimum detectable effect, alpha and power to sample size and weeks, cross-checked against a published calculator.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗03Variance and the unit-of-analysis problem
- Take a ratio metric whose denominator is not the randomization unit (clicks per session, randomized by user) and compute the standard error twice, once naively at session level and once by the delta method or a user-level bootstrap, then record how much the naive version understates it.
- Implement CUPED on simulated data: choose a pre-period covariate X measured before assignment, estimate theta as Cov(Y, X) divided by Var(X), and analyse Y minus theta times (X minus its mean) in place of Y. Confirm the variance of the adjusted outcome equals the raw variance multiplied by one minus the squared correlation between Y and X, so a correlation of 0.45 removes about 20 percent of the variance and not 80.
- Now run that simulation a few hundred times and confirm the adjusted effect estimate is unbiased for the same effect rather than numerically identical to the raw one. Within any single run the two differ, sometimes by a large fraction of the true effect, because the two arms' pre-period covariate means never coincide exactly in a finite sample; they agree in expectation, which is the property that matters and the one to state out loud.
Deliverable: A notebook showing the adjusted estimator with a measurably smaller variance than the raw one, plus a repeated-simulation table showing the two estimators agreeing on average while differing run by run.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗04Validity threats you can actually test for
- Run a sample ratio mismatch check as a chi-square goodness-of-fit test against the intended allocation, and write the three causes you would chase first (assignment logged before exposure, an arm-specific redirect or load failure, bot filtering applied asymmetrically).
- Simulate peeking: generate A/A data, test daily at alpha 0.05 across 14 looks, record the inflated false positive rate, then apply an alpha-spending boundary or commit to a fixed horizon and confirm the rate returns to nominal.
- Write how you would separate a novelty effect from a durable lift using the treatment effect plotted against days since first exposure, and what shape would change your recommendation.
Deliverable: One table showing the peeking false positive rate before and after correction, plus a written SRM triage list.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗05When randomization is not available
- Write the identifying assumption for difference-in-differences (parallel trends in the absence of treatment), then plot pre-period trends for two candidate control groups and justify rejecting one of them.
- Design a switchback test for a change where user-level randomization would leak across participants, choosing a time-block length against the carryover you expect and saying how you would detect carryover in the data.
- List what an interrupted time series or a synthetic control buys you and the one thing neither can rule out: an unobserved shock that coincides with the launch.
Deliverable: A one-page memo recommending a single quasi-experimental design and naming its weakest assumption explicitly.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗06The readout query
- Write the assignment-to-exposure join that returns exactly one row per unit per experiment, and handle units appearing in both arms by excluding and counting them rather than silently keeping one.
- Compute the per-arm metric, its variance and the relative lift with a confidence interval in SQL, then reproduce the identical numbers in a notebook as a cross-check.
- Add a segment breakdown and write the sentence that keeps it from being p-hacking: segments declared in advance, everything else reported as exploratory and corrected for multiplicity.
Deliverable: A single query that outputs the full readout table, matched to a notebook recomputation.
Practice prompt ↗07Present it to someone who will not read the appendix
- Give a 10-minute readout of a real or simulated experiment in the order decision, number, uncertainty, caveat.
- Have your listener ask "can we ship it" in the case where the primary is flat and a guardrail moved, and answer with a recommendation rather than a request for more data.
- Rewrite your opening line so the recommendation lands before any methodology.
Deliverable: A one-page readout whose first line is the recommendation.
Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗Expand any day for tasks and deliverables. Your progress is saved on this device.
An answer without a quantity is hard to interrogate, so interviewers keep probing until they find one. Come with the baseline, the change, the window it was measured over, and how confident you were. If the effect never got measured, say so and say what you would have measured. Fabricated precision is worse than an honest gap.
How do you handle uncertainty in model predictions when dealing with e…
How do you handle uncertainty in model predictions when dealing with experimental data?
Approach
- Quantify the outcome, including what you would not claim credit for.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on your reasoning.
- Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
Follow-up
- How did you know the outcome was caused by your change?
- What did you decide not to do, and why?
Own an analysis that shipped wrong and was acted on
Describe an analysis you delivered that was wrong, where someone acted on it before the error surfaced. Pick something with a mechanism you can name, not a typo. Cover what the number claimed, what was actually true, how much time passed before it was caught, who caught it, and what you told the people who had already acted. Deliverable: a five-minute account that ends with the specific control you added afterwards, plus one occasion since when that control has fired.
Approach
- Read the probe: the interviewer is testing whether you detect your own errors and whether the correction was structural. Pick an error with a nameable mechanism (a denominator built from distinct members instead of member-months, a series read before claims runout completed, a cohort selected on the outcome) so the story has a diagnosis rather than a mood.
- Open with the decision that was made on your number, not with the bug. The severity of an analytic error is measured in the action it caused: a rate filing, a staffing plan, a programme expansion.
- State the counterfactual number. 'The true figure was 14.1 admissions per 1,000 member-years, not 9.8' is a fact; 'it was off by a lot' is not.
- Describe the detection path honestly, including whether you found it or somebody else did. Say how long it took, because time to detection is the part you actually control next time.
- Close on the control, and make it something that protects a reader who has never met you: a unit test on the denominator, a paid-through date stamped on every chart, a required exclusions block in the spec template. Name one later date it caught something.
Follow-up
- What would have had to be true for you to catch this before delivery rather than after?
- Did the stakeholder change how much they trust your work, and did you want them to?
- Give an example of a control you added that turned out to be the wrong control.
Push back on an over-broad extract without blocking the work
A researcher asks for a one-off extract covering 12,000 members: member_id, date of birth, five-digit residential postal code, full lab_result rows including value_text, and clinical note text, held on their laptop for a retrospective analysis of one lab analyte over time. They describe it as de-identified because names are excluded. A flat refusal is not an acceptable answer. Deliverable: the column list you will actually provide with a justification per retained field, the sentence explaining why free text defeats an enumerated-identifier approach, your small-cell rule for the published stratification, and what you deliver this week.
Approach
- The probe is whether privacy is a design skill for you or a compliance reflex. Flat refusal and unquestioned fulfilment both fail, for opposite reasons.
- Reconstruct the analysis from the research question rather than from the request. A longitudinal trend in one analyte needs a stable pseudonymous subject key, the analyte's loinc_code, value_numeric, units, the reference bounds, and a date. It does not need names, notes, or a precise birth date.
- Replace each identifier with the least precise version that still answers the question: a salted per-study pseudonym instead of member_id, age in years or an age band instead of date of birth, a consistent per-subject date offset if only intervals matter, and a coarser geography than five-digit postal code.
- Explain the free-text problem in one sentence. Removing an enumerated list of identifier fields does not de-identify a note, because notes carry names, relationships, employers, dates and rare clinical detail in prose, so only a reviewed extraction into structured fields or a formal statistical determination addresses it.
- Set the publication rule before the analysis runs. Suppress cells below a stated threshold and suppress complements too, because a reader holding a row total and all but one cell recovers the suppressed count by subtraction.
- Keep them moving. Deliver the reduced extract into a controlled environment this week rather than onto a laptop, and offer to derive any note-based variable yourself as a structured flag so they never need the prose.
Follow-up
- They say the age band loses resolution their model needs. What do you do?
- How do you set the suppression threshold, and who signs off on it?
- The analysis later needs linking to a second data source. What changes?
- 01
How do you handle uncertainty in model predictions when dealing with experimental data?
- 02
Describe an analysis you delivered that was wrong, where someone acted on it before the error surfaced. Pick something with a mechanism you can name, not a typo. Cover what the number claimed, what was actually true, how much time passed before it was caught, who caught it, and what you told the people who had already acted. Deliverable: a five-minute account that ends with the specific control you added afterwards, plus one occasion since when that control has fired.
- 03
A researcher asks for a one-off extract covering 12,000 members: member_id, date of birth, five-digit residential postal code, full lab_result rows including value_text, and clinical note text, held on their laptop for a retrospective analysis of one lab analyte over time. They describe it as de-identified because names are excluded. A flat refusal is not an acceptable answer. Deliverable: the column list you will actually provide with a justification per retained field, the sentence explaining why free text defeats an enumerated-identifier approach, your small-cell rule for the published stratification, and what you deliver this week.
Is this an official BigHat Biosciences interview guide?
No. It is PracHub's own research and practice material for the Data Scientist role at BigHat Biosciences. Rounds and questions reflect what candidates have reported, not a process BigHat Biosciences has published, and they change over time. Confirm the current format and scope with your recruiter.
PracHub interview research ↗Is there live coding involved in the interview?
Most candidates report that the process focuses on oral case studies and a take-home assignment rather than live coding. Focus your preparation on discussing your methodology and system design choices.
PracHub interview research ↗How much do I need to know about biology?
While you don't need a PhD in Biology, a solid grasp of basic protein structure and a curiosity about the domain is essential. You will be expected to understand the biological implications of your models.
PracHub interview research ↗What is the typical timeline for the hiring process?
The process is generally efficient, often moving from the initial screen to a final decision within a few weeks. Communication is typically described as clear and responsive.
PracHub interview research ↗What differentiates successful candidates?
Successful candidates typically demonstrate a strong "product sense" for ML—they don't just build models in a vacuum; they think about how those models serve the broader goal of protein discovery.
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.
- 01PracHub interview research ↗
PracHub editorial research into this company and role, maintained with this guide. Candidate-reported, not an employer publication.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22 - 02PracHub Data Scientist practice ↗
Cross-company practice questions for this role.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22 - 03PracHub interview preparation framework ↗
The framework the preparation plan follows.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22
Explore related engineering environments and compare the preparation focus.
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