Globant · Data Scientist
Updated · 2026-09-24

Globant Data Scientist
Interview Questions & Guide 2026

THE 60-SECOND BRIEF

A Data Scientist at Globant operates at the intersection of advanced analytics, machine learning engineering, and strategic business consulting. You are not merely building models in a vacuum; you are solving high-stakes, complex problems for a diverse portfolio of global clients. Your work directly influences how these organizations leverage their data to optimize operations, enhance user experiences, and drive digital transformation.

How much statistics you need depends on the flavour of the seat. Experiment-facing work wants you deep enough to notice that repeated looks at accumulating data inflate the false positive rate of a fixed-sample test; modelling-facing work wants estimation and honest uncertainty intervals.

Globant candidates report 5 rounds · ≈ 4-6 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

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

33 min read

Browse Data Scientist questions

See the practice prompts

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

A Data Scientist at Globant operates at the intersection of advanced analytics, machine learning engineering, and strategic business consulting. You are not merely building models in a vacuum; you are solving high-stakes, complex problems for a diverse portfolio of global clients. Your work directly influences how these organizations leverage their data to optimize operations, enhance user experiences, and drive digital transformation.

The role requires a unique blend of technical rigor and adaptability. Because Globant often embeds its talent directly within client teams, you must be comfortable pivoting between different domains and industries. You will be expected to bridge the gap between abstract data insights and actionable, deployable solutions, ensuring that your models are not only theoretically sound but also production-ready and scalable within cloud environments.

01

HR 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

Technical Evaluations

reported

A handful of shapes account for most of what gets asked in this format: a ranking or deduplication inside groups, a running or rolling total, a period-over-period comparison, and a cohort tracked forward over time. Recognising the shape quickly is most of the speed here; deriving it from scratch while a clock runs is where the time goes. Know that a window function keeps every row while a GROUP BY collapses them, and know which one the question needs. If the exercise is in Python instead of SQL, the same shapes arrive as groupby with transform, shift and merge, and the same grain mistakes are available.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether you reach the right construct without a detour, such as ROW_NUMBER over a partition to deduplicate instead of a self-join against a MAX subquery
  • Whether you know what your window frame actually is, since adding ORDER BY inside OVER changes the default frame and silently changes a running total
  • Whether the thing runs. A near-miss that throws an error scores below a plainer query that returns the right rows.

How to prepare

  • Write each of the four shapes once from memory against a small schema and keep the working version somewhere you will reread it: dedupe with ROW_NUMBER, a running total, a month-over-month change with LAG, and a retention table
  • Compute one running total twice on data with tied timestamps, once on the default frame and once with ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW, and look at where the two disagree
  • If Python is on the table, rebuild the dedupe and the running total with groupby and cumsum, then assert the two implementations return identical rows
PracHub interview research ↗
03

Exploratory Data Analysis

reported

Rounds outside the standard loop often open with something deliberately under-specified: a loose business problem, an open question about a product area, a dataset described in one sentence. The common failure is surveying, listing six plausible approaches and committing to none of them. The thing that separates a strong answer is scoping out loud. State what you are treating as the goal, name the metric you would move, say what you are choosing not to do and why, then take one path through to an actual answer. An interviewer can follow you down a narrow path. Nobody can grade a menu.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether you turn an ambiguous prompt into a stated question with a measurable outcome before doing any work
  • The judgement visible in what you cut, and whether you say why you cut it rather than silently dropping it
  • Whether you land on a concrete recommendation with its caveat attached, rather than an unranked set of options

How to prepare

  • Take three vague prompts, such as 'is this feature working', 'why did retention drop', and 'should we expand into a new segment'. For each, write one sentence of goal, one primary metric with its window, and two things you are explicitly not doing.
  • Practise giving the recommendation first and the reasoning second, in five minutes. Loosely defined rounds are usually time-boxed, and an answer that arrives last often does not arrive.
  • Keep a running assumption list as you talk, on paper or in the shared doc, so the interviewer can challenge one assumption instead of your whole answer.
PracHub interview research ↗
04

Model Deployment Questions

reported

An extra round usually exists because something is still open after the standard loop: a skill the earlier interviews did not sample, a level decision, or two interviewers who disagreed. It is rarely a rerun of what you already did well. Ask the recruiter who you are meeting, what function they sit in, and how long the session runs. That is an ordinary scheduling question, and the answer changes what you should prepare. What separates a strong candidate here is treating the round as a fresh evaluation with its own bar, rather than assuming earlier performance carries you through or sinks you.

What to demonstrate

  • Whether you can answer well on ground the earlier rounds did not cover, without leaning on what you already said to someone else
  • Consistency of the facts in your stories: the same sample size, timeframe, team size and scope of your own role as in earlier conversations
  • How you handle an unfamiliar format live, including whether you ask what kind of answer is wanted before producing one

How to prepare

  • Ask the recruiter for the interviewer's function, the length, and whether to expect a coding surface, a discussion, or a presentation. Preparing for a 30 minute conversation with a partner team is not the same work as preparing for a 60 minute technical block.
  • Write out what each earlier round actually covered, then list the two or three areas nobody probed. That gap is the most likely subject of the extra round.
  • Re-read the numbers in the project stories you have already told, so a second telling does not quietly contradict the first.
PracHub interview research ↗
05

Client Fit Interview

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 on an identity key that changes underneath the metric

visitor_id is per browser and per device, and it resets on cookie clearance, private browsing and platform privacy changes, so the distinct-visitor count drifts upward for reasons unrelated to reach. Any rate with visitors in the denominator therefore decays over time even when behaviour is constant, and any rate with visitors in the numerator inflates. The stitching at signup makes it worse in both directions: a user who signed up on mobile and returns on desktop is two visitors and one user, while a shared device is one visitor and several users. Decide which key each metric is counted on, write it into the definition, and when comparing a period before and after a platform privacy change, expect a level shift in every visitor-keyed metric and do not attribute it to the product.

02

Slicing a flat experiment until a segment reaches significance

Testing one metric across twenty segments at a nominal 5% level produces a significant result about two thirds of the time when nothing is happening anywhere, and the segment that surfaces is by construction the one with the most favourable noise. The reported effect in that slice is then badly overstated, because selection on significance conditions the estimate on being large. What makes it dangerous rather than merely wrong is that a post-hoc segment always has a plausible story attached, so it survives the meeting. The controls are declaring the small number of segments of interest before launch, correcting across the ones tested, and treating anything discovered afterwards as a hypothesis that needs its own adequately-powered test rather than a finding.

03

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.

04

Never asking what decision the analysis will inform

Open with who makes the decision, what the options are, and by when. The answer determines the precision you need, the segments worth cutting, and whether an observational read suffices or an experiment is required.

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

Which probability distributions are you most familiar with, and when w…

medium
statistics and probability

Which probability distributions are you most familiar with, and when would you apply them in a real-world scenario?

Approach
  1. Say what the estimate is of, and over what population it generalises.
  2. Sanity-check the answer against a simple bound or a simulated case.
  3. Write down the assumption the method needs before you use the method.
Follow-up
  • What sample size would you need to detect an effect half this size?
  • Which assumption here is most likely to be violated in practice?

What are the primary assumptions behind linear regression, and how do …

medium
machine learning and modelling

What are the primary assumptions behind linear regression, and how do you validate them?

Approach
  1. Say how the offline result would be validated online before it is trusted.
  2. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
  3. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
Follow-up
  • What would you monitor after launch to know the model is still valid?
  • Where could label leakage enter this setup?

Can you describe the architecture of a specific deep learning model an…

medium
machine learning and modelling

Can you describe the architecture of a specific deep learning model and its use case?

Approach
  1. Set a baseline first, so any model has something honest to beat.
  2. Check what information would not exist at prediction time, and exclude it.
  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 approach the deployment of a machine learning model?

medium
machine learning and modelling

How do you approach the deployment of a machine learning model?

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. Pick an evaluation metric that matches the cost of each error type, not a default.
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

mediumWorked solution
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.
Worked solution 30 min
  1. users = dim_user[~dim_user.is_internal].copy(); created = users['account_created_at_utc']; users['cohort_week'] = created.dt.floor('D') - pd.to_timedelta(created.dt.weekday, unit='D'), which is the Monday-start week. The period spelling that agrees with it is created.dt.to_period('W').dt.start_time; 'W-MON' does not agree and is off by a day.
  2. ev = events[events.is_core_action & events.user_id.notna()]; merge onto users on user_id with how='inner' for the numerator side only.
  3. Filter to the half-open window, add ev_date = occurred_at_utc.dt.date, group by user_id and count distinct dates, keep users with >= 2.
  4. numer = users.merge(activated_user_ids, how='left', indicator=True) then group by cohort_week and sum the indicator; denom = users.groupby('cohort_week').size().
  5. rate = numer / denom; drop weeks where users.groupby('cohort_week')['account_created_at_utc'].max() > data_max - 8 days.
EXPECTED RESULTOne row per mature cohort week with numerator, denominator and rate, where denominator equals the count of non-internal signups in that week regardless of activity, numerator is less than or equal to denominator, and the most recent 1 to 2 weeks are absent rather than reported low.
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?

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.

Have two ready. In one, the data was on your side and you had to move someone who outranked you. In the other, the pushback was correct and you changed position. The second is the harder story and it lands better, because it shows you separate being right from being attached to an answer. Name the person's actual objection.

Can you describe a project where you had to pivot your approach due to…

medium
behavioural and stakeholder questions

Can you describe a project where you had to pivot your approach due to changing requirements?

Approach
  1. Quantify the outcome, including what you would not claim credit for.
  2. Name the disagreement or constraint, and how you resolved it with evidence.
  3. Pick a story where you drove the decision, not one where you observed it.
Follow-up
  • What did you decide not to do, and why?
  • What would you do differently if you ran that project again?

How do you handle data drift in a live environment?

medium
behavioural and stakeholder questions

How do you handle data drift in a live environment?

Approach
  1. Name the disagreement or constraint, and how you resolved it with evidence.
  2. Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
  3. Pick a story where you drove the decision, not one where you observed it.
Follow-up
  • What did you decide not to do, and why?
  • How did you know the outcome was caused by your change?

Choose between three teams' requests with one analyst-week

medium
prioritisationstakeholderjudgement

You have one analyst-week. Three requests land the same morning. A growth team wants a paid-channel readout before a Friday spend decision. A billing team wants gross monthly revenue churn rebuilt, because the current figure recognises cancellation at canceled_at_utc rather than period_end_utc and is therefore wrong. A product team wants a dashboard for a feature launching in six weeks. All three sponsors are peers of your manager. Deliver your ranking, the explicit rule that produced it, and the message you send to the two teams you defer.

Approach
  1. Recognise what is being probed: whether you prioritise on decision value and reversibility or on who asked most recently and most loudly. The generic answer sorts by importance; the strong one states a rule, applies it, and accepts the ranking it produces even where that is uncomfortable.
  2. Score each request on three statable things: the decision it unblocks and the date that decision is made, the cost of being wrong in the meantime, and whether the work is one-off or compounding. A wrong published churn figure compounds, because it is quoted downstream and enters forecasts; the channel readout has a fixed date that cannot move; the dashboard has six weeks of slack.
  3. Notice the tension between value and urgency rather than resolving it by feel. The churn defect is the most valuable item and the least urgent one, which is exactly the shape of work that never gets done.
  4. Break the churn item in two. A one-hour severity check, sizing the gap between the two recognition points in MRR, is cheap enough to do before ranking anything and may promote the item outright. Do that first, then rank.
  5. Make the deferrals concrete. Each deferred team gets a date, a reason expressed as another team's decision deadline rather than as relative importance, and the smallest thing you can hand them immediately.
Follow-up
  • The dashboard team escalates to your manager. What do you say in that conversation?
  • Your severity check shows churn is overstated by 15%. Does the ranking change, and does anybody need to be told today regardless of the ranking?
  • A fourth request arrives Wednesday with a Thursday deadline. What comes off the list, and who do you tell first?
  • 01

    Can you describe a project where you had to pivot your approach due to changing requirements?

  • 02

    How do you handle data drift in a live environment?

  • 03

    You have one analyst-week. Three requests land the same morning. A growth team wants a paid-channel readout before a Friday spend decision. A billing team wants gross monthly revenue churn rebuilt, because the current figure recognises cancellation at canceled_at_utc rather than period_end_utc and is therefore wrong. A product team wants a dashboard for a feature launching in six weeks. All three sponsors are peers of your manager. Deliver your ranking, the explicit rule that produced it, and the message you send to the two teams you defer.

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

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

PracHub interview research ↗
How difficult are the technical interviews?

The difficulty is generally considered average to high, depending on the complexity of the project you are being interviewed for. Expect a strong focus on core ML theory and practical coding skills.

PracHub interview research ↗
Is there a lot of memorization involved?

Some interviewers do focus on fundamental concepts that may feel theoretical. While you should know your definitions, always try to pivot toward how that concept solved a problem in your past projects.

PracHub interview research ↗
What is the "Dojo" mentioned in some experiences?

The "Dojo" is an internal talent pool at Globant. If you pass the technical bar but aren't immediately assigned to a client, you may work within the Dojo on internal projects until a suitable client match is found.

PracHub interview research ↗
How long does the process take?

The process is usually well-organized and can be quite fast if there is an urgent need for a project. However, expect a multi-week commitment due to the number of rounds involved.

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.