First American Financial · Data Scientist
Updated · 2026-09-24

First American Financial Data Scientist
Interview Questions & Guide 2026

THE 60-SECOND BRIEF

As a Data Scientist at First American Financial, you operate at the intersection of complex financial data and industry-leading real estate solutions. Your work supports the organization’s ability to assess risk, streamline title and settlement services, and provide data-driven insights that help First American Financial's clients make informed decisions. You will be responsible for building, deploying, and maintaining predictive models that directly influence the company's core business operations.

Most of the loop measures decision-making under uncertainty rather than recall. You are scored on whether you state your assumptions, commit to an estimate you can defend, and say explicitly what evidence would change it.

First American Financial candidates report 2 rounds · ≈ 2-4 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

Report only matured cohorts for loss metricsReconcile amounts in minor units and currencySet fraud thresholds by expected cost

28 min read

Browse Data Scientist questions

See the practice prompts

14Practice promptsAcross five skill areas
3With worked solutionsIncluded in the practice prompts

As a Data Scientist at First American Financial, you operate at the intersection of complex financial data and industry-leading real estate solutions. Your work supports the organization’s ability to assess risk, streamline title and settlement services, and provide data-driven insights that help First American Financial's clients make informed decisions. You will be responsible for building, deploying, and maintaining predictive models that directly influence the company's core business operations.

This role is both challenging and high-impact. Because First American Financial deals with massive datasets related to property, insurance, and lending, you will often find yourself tackling problems involving high cardinality features and complex data structures. Whether you are automating manual processes or refining risk assessment algorithms, your contributions will be central to how the company maintains its competitive edge in a highly regulated and data-intensive sector.

The data science function at First American Financial is evolving; emphasize your ability to bring structure to ambiguous problems and communicate technical value to non-technical stakeholders.

01

Initial Screening

reported

Most candidates lose this call inside the first two minutes, during the walkthrough of their own background. The account runs chronologically, sits at the level of tools and titles, and never arrives at a decision anyone could have disagreed with. Anchor on a problem instead of a timeline: what the team could not answer, what you did about it, what happened next. Ninety seconds is enough, and stopping on time leaves room for the half of the call that belongs to you. What you ask about how work gets prioritised signals your level more reliably than the walkthrough does.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether your background summary has a shape (problem, decision, consequence) or is a chronological list of tools and employers
  • Whether you can account for gaps, short stints and the reason you are looking, unprompted and without hedging
  • The substance of the questions you ask back, which an experienced screener reads as a level signal

How to prepare

  • Time your opening walkthrough against a clock. If it runs past two minutes, compress the earliest role into a single clause and spend the recovered time on the most recent one
  • Write one honest sentence for every gap or short stint visible on your resume and offer it before being asked about it
  • Prepare questions about how work arrives and gets prioritised: who writes the request, how often priorities change, and what happens to an analysis after it is delivered
PracHub interview research ↗
02

Virtual Interviews

reported

An added round often puts you in front of someone outside the core hiring team: a partner engineer, a product owner, a domain expert, sometimes a more senior manager. The question they are really asking is not whether you can do the work but whether they would trust a number that came from you. That changes what a good answer looks like. Lead with what the decision cost and what it changed, keep the method available but not central, and be plain about the limits of your evidence. Overstating a result is the fastest way to lose this round.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether you can explain a technical choice to someone who will never read your code, without either flattening it into nothing or hiding inside jargon
  • Honesty about evidence strength: what the analysis establishes, what it only suggests, and what it cannot say at all
  • How you take disagreement, specifically whether you update on a good objection, hold your position with reasons, or fold on contact

How to prepare

  • Write the two-sentence version of your most technical project for a non-specialist, then check that neither sentence needs a method name to make sense.
  • For one result you are proud of, write the strongest objection someone could raise and a response that concedes the part of it that is correct.
  • Prepare one decision that turned out to be wrong: how you found out, what it cost, and what you changed afterwards. A senior cross-functional interviewer asks for this more often than a technical one does.
PracHub interview research ↗

PracHub editorial advice for the preparation topics above.

01

Counting authorizations instead of weighting them, and summing amounts across currencies

Declines skew toward high-value, cross-border and card-not-present transactions, so an unweighted approval rate can sit flat while approved value falls. Merchant retry logic also turns one declined purchase into several rows, inflating the denominator by an amount that varies by merchant and by decline reason. Amounts are held in the minor unit of the transaction currency and that unit is not always two decimals, since some currencies have none and some have three, so summing amount_minor across currencies produces a figure with no interpretation at all.

02

Averaging delinquency across a book that is growing

A loan three months old cannot be 90 days past due, so a portfolio with many recent originations reports a low blended 90+ rate purely from age mix. The blended rate falls fastest exactly when originations grow fastest, which is precisely when credit quality most needs watching, so the metric moves in the reassuring direction during the riskiest period. Only comparisons at equal months on book are valid, which is what a vintage or roll-rate view enforces.

03

Dropping rows with missing values without naming the mechanism

Say whether the values are missing at random, missing by a known process, or missing in a way that depends on the outcome, and handle them accordingly. Deleting incomplete rows silently redefines the population whenever missingness correlates with what you are measuring.

04

Defining the cohort on a post-treatment condition

Ask how rows entered the table. Filtering on something that treatment itself influences, such as users who finished onboarding or accounts still active at ninety days, breaks comparability between arms; define the population at an entry point that precedes exposure and keep everyone in it.

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

11 technical prompts3 include a worked solution

Describe the process of feature selection when you have hundreds of po…

medium
machine learning and modelling

Describe the process of feature selection when you have hundreds of potential variables.

Approach
  1. Say how the offline result would be validated online before it is trusted.
  2. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
  3. Frame the prediction: the label, the moment of prediction, and the action it triggers.
Follow-up
  • What would you monitor after launch to know the model is still valid?
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?

How would you handle high cardinality features in a predictive model?

medium
machine learning and modelling

How would you handle high cardinality features in a predictive model?

Approach
  1. Frame the prediction: the label, the moment of prediction, and the action it triggers.
  2. Say how the offline result would be validated online before it is trusted.
  3. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
Follow-up
  • How would you choose the decision threshold, and who owns that choice?
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?

How do you validate a model to ensure it generalizes well to new, unse…

medium
machine learning and modelling

How do you validate a model to ensure it generalizes well to new, unseen data?

Approach
  1. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
  2. Frame the prediction: the label, the moment of prediction, and the action it triggers.
  3. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
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?

Bootstrap a fraud loss rate that clusters within merchant

mediumWorked solution
bootstrapclustered resamplingheavy tails

You have a per-transaction frame with auth_id, merchant_id, settled_amount_reporting and net_loss_reporting, both already in one reporting currency. Most rows carry zero loss, a few carry large ones, and losses cluster within merchant. Using only numpy's random generator and no resampling helper from any library, write a bootstrap that returns a 95 percent interval for net fraud loss in basis points of settled volume, resampling merchants with replacement and taking all rows belonging to each drawn merchant. Also produce the naive row-level interval and state which you would report.

Approach
  1. State the estimator before writing it: total net loss divided by total settled volume, times 10,000. It is a ratio of sums, so each replicate recomputes both sums. Averaging per-transaction loss rates instead would weight a five-unit transaction like a five-thousand-unit one.
  2. Pre-aggregate loss and volume to merchant level once. For a ratio of sums, drawing merchants and taking all their rows is arithmetically identical to drawing merchant-level (loss_sum, volume_sum) pairs, so a replicate becomes one integer draw plus two vectorised sums rather than a groupby inside the loop.
  3. Draw B replicates of M merchant indices with replacement, where M is the observed merchant count, compute the ratio per replicate, and take the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles. Say explicitly that this is a percentile interval and that BCa would correct the skew-induced bias if the decision is close.
  4. Repeat with independent row draws for the naive interval and compare widths on the same replicate count.
  5. Report the clustered interval. Rows within a merchant share an acceptance profile, a category code and a fraud exposure, so they are not independent, and the row-level interval understates variance by roughly the design effect.
Worked solution 30 min
  1. Compute the point estimate directly on the full data and keep it for comparison.
  2. Aggregate to merchant-level loss and volume arrays, record M, and set B to 2,000 with a seeded numpy Generator.
  3. In a vectorised loop, draw integer indices of shape (B, M), index both arrays, sum along axis 1, and take the ratio times 10,000.
  4. Repeat for the row-level version using the per-transaction arrays and N draws.
  5. Take the 2.5 and 97.5 percentiles of each replicate array and report both intervals alongside the point estimate.
EXPECTED RESULTTwo intervals in basis points sharing the same point estimate. The clustered interval is materially wider, commonly two to four times, and is right-skewed because a heavy merchant can be drawn more than once in a replicate.
Follow-up
  • Your clustered interval is three times wider. How do you explain that to someone who wanted a tighter number?
  • One merchant accounts for 40 percent of losses. What does that do to the interval, and what would you do about it?
  • How does this change if the question is whether two months differ rather than what this month's rate is?

Instead of guessing where the week should go, day one measures it under a fixed rubric and allocates the remaining hours in proportion to the gaps. The method is deliberately rigid: the allocation is written down before any studying starts and is not renegotiated when a topic turns out to be unpleasant.

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
01Diagnostic, scored before you study anything
  • Sit a 100-minute timed diagnostic in four blocks: 30 minutes of SQL across three prompts, 25 minutes of short-answer statistics, 25 minutes on one modelling or case prompt, and 20 minutes delivering one behavioural story aloud.
  • Score each block from 0 to 3 on a fixed rubric where 3 is correct and fluent, 2 is correct but slow or prompted, 1 is partially correct, and 0 is stuck, grading the output rather than how the attempt felt.
  • Allocate the hours for days two to five roughly in proportion to 3 minus the score in each block, write the allocation down, and commit to not revising it midweek.

Deliverable: A scored rubric and a fixed hour allocation for the rest of the week.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗
02Largest gap: find the boundary rather than the subject
  • Break the weakest area into five named sub-skills (for query work: grain control, window frames, date arithmetic, set logic with NULLs, and reading a query plan) and rate each one, so the rest of the week targets a sub-skill instead of a subject.
  • Solve three problems chosen to sit just above where the rating drops off, and for each write the first move you failed to make.
  • Re-solve one of them from memory four hours later, on paper, with nothing open.

Deliverable: A five-item sub-skill map with the two blocking sub-skills circled.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
03Largest gap: drill the blocking sub-skill
  • Do eight short repetitions of the same shape rather than eight different problems, so what you practise is the pattern and not the puzzle.
  • Write the rule you now hold in one sentence, then test it against a case built to break it: a ranking function over a column with ties, or a two-sample test on observations that are obviously dependent.
  • Have someone else read your one-sentence rule and find the precondition you left out.

Deliverable: One rule statement with its preconditions attached and one counterexample that would have caught the incomplete version.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
04Second gap, plus maintenance on your strongest area
  • Run the same sub-skill map and boundary protocol on the second-largest gap, compressed into half the day.
  • Spend 25 timed minutes on your strongest area to stop it decaying, choosing the hardest problem you can still finish rather than an easy warm-up.
  • Compare how the two areas fail: whether you lose time on recall, on setup, or on arithmetic, because the fix differs for each.

Deliverable: A second sub-skill map plus a one-line diagnosis of how each area fails you.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗
05The gap that is not a skill
  • Record yourself answering one technical and one behavioural prompt, then count two things in the playback: how many seconds before your first clarifying question, and how many sentences you started without knowing where they ended.
  • Rewrite your three most-used stock phrases into shorter versions, and practise saying "I do not know, here is how I would find out" without softening it into a guess.
  • Deliver one answer again with a hard 90-second limit to force structure before detail.

Deliverable: Two recordings with a counted improvement in time-to-first-question.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
06Retest under day-one conditions
  • Sit the same 100-minute diagnostic structure with new prompts of comparable difficulty and score it on the identical rubric.
  • Compare block by block, and for any block that did not move, change the method rather than adding hours: a block stuck at 1 usually means the practice was too varied, not too short.
  • Write which single block you would still lose the offer on.

Deliverable: A second scored rubric placed next to the first, with one named remaining risk.

Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗
07Full loop under interview conditions
  • Run a 60-minute mock covering the two blocks that moved least, with an interviewer instructed to interrupt and change direction.
  • Write your recovery script for the moment you go blank: restate the question, state your assumption, name the first thing you would check.
  • Reduce the week to the rule statements you wrote, each with its preconditions attached, then say every one of them out loud without reading it and cut any you cannot state in a single sentence, since a rule you have to reconstruct mid-answer will not survive being interrupted.

Deliverable: A one-page card holding the recovery script and only the rules you could state from memory.

Practice prompt ↗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.

Tell me about a time you failed to meet a project goal. What did you l…

medium
behavioural and stakeholder questions

Tell me about a time you failed to meet a project goal. What did you learn?

Approach
  1. Quantify the outcome, including what you would not claim credit for.
  2. Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
  3. Name the disagreement or constraint, and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
  • How did you know the outcome was caused by your change?
  • What would you do differently if you ran that project again?

Describe a project where you faced significant data quality issues. Ho…

medium
behavioural and stakeholder questions

Describe a project where you faced significant data quality issues. How did you resolve them?

Approach
  1. Pick a story where you drove the decision, not one where you observed it.
  2. Quantify the outcome, including what you would not claim credit for.
  3. Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
Follow-up
  • What did you decide not to do, and why?
  • How did you know the outcome was caused by your change?

Explain an incomplete dispute chart to a non-technical executive

easy
dispute maturitystakeholder communicationright-censoring

A finance lead is looking at first-chargeback rate by transaction month, built from fct_card_dispute joined to fct_payment_authorization on auth_id and attributed to requested_at. The last three months slope sharply down and the lead wants to announce a fraud improvement at tomorrow's review. Consumer dispute rights commonly run around 120 days from the transaction or expected delivery date, so those months are not complete. In five minutes, with no statistics vocabulary, explain why the decline is not yet evidence and say exactly what you would put on the slide instead.

Approach
  1. Lead with the mechanism in the listener's own terms, not with the statistical name for it: a dispute is attributed to the month the transaction happened, but it can be filed up to roughly 120 days later, so recent months contain only the disputes filed so far.
  2. Show completeness rather than arguing about the rate: for each transaction month, plot the share of its eventual disputes already filed, estimated from months that are fully matured. The last three months will sit visibly below 100 percent.
  3. Replace the chart with two artefacts: a matured series that stops 120 days back and is labelled final, and a development-factor estimate for the immature months drawn as a dashed range and labelled an estimate.
  4. Hand over one sentence the executive can repeat without you in the room: the recent months look better because the disputes have not arrived yet, not because fewer will arrive.
  5. Offer a weekly signal they can watch instead, such as the risk-score mix of approved volume or the decline-rule hit rate, and state up front what it does and does not predict.
Follow-up
  • The deck ships tomorrow regardless. What exactly goes on the slide, and what wording do you insist on?
  • How would you estimate the development factors, and how would you notice if they had shifted?
  • 01

    Tell me about a time you failed to meet a project goal. What did you learn?

  • 02

    Describe a project where you faced significant data quality issues. How did you resolve them?

  • 03

    A finance lead is looking at first-chargeback rate by transaction month, built from fct_card_dispute joined to fct_payment_authorization on auth_id and attributed to requested_at. The last three months slope sharply down and the lead wants to announce a fraud improvement at tomorrow's review. Consumer dispute rights commonly run around 120 days from the transaction or expected delivery date, so those months are not complete. In five minutes, with no statistics vocabulary, explain why the decline is not yet evidence and say exactly what you would put on the slide instead.

PracHub interview preparation framework ↗
Is this an official First American Financial interview guide?

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

PracHub interview research ↗
How long does the interview process typically take?

The process can take several weeks from the initial phone screen to a final decision. Stay proactive and keep in regular contact with your recruiting point of contact.

PracHub interview research ↗
Is the technical assessment purely algorithmic?

While you will face coding challenges, they are often grounded in data science scenarios. Expect to write code that demonstrates your ability to manipulate data and implement machine learning logic effectively.

PracHub interview research ↗
What differentiates successful candidates?

Successful candidates are those who demonstrate "business-first" thinking. They don't just build the most complex model; they build the most effective model for the business problem at hand.

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.