G-Research Interview Questions & Prep

“Tell me about a time you had a significant disagreement with a teammate over a technical direction. How did you resolve it?”

“Give an example of a project where you misjudged the complexity or timeline. How did you recover?”

“Suppose $X$ and $Y$ are mean zero, unit variance random variables. If the least squares regression of $Y$ against $X$ gives a slope of $\beta$, what is the slope of the regression of $X$ against $Y$?”

“If I break a stick of unit length into three random pieces, what is the expected length of the largest piece?”

“How would you detect overfitting in a machine learning model applied to noisy financial time series data?”

“What is the Delta of an at-the-money binary option as time approaches expiry?”

“Suppose the moon were to disintegrate and fall to earth over 5,000 years. How does this influx of power compare to that of the Sun?”

“If you are completely stuck on a live coding problem, what do you do?”

“What is a commonly accepted statistical assumption in finance that you believe is fundamentally flawed?”

“How would you price a used car market if you had no access to historical pricing data?”

“Describe a situation where your code or model failed in production. How did you handle it?”

“Give an example of a time you disagreed with a senior colleague or professor. How did you resolve the impasse?”

“How do you prioritize competing tasks when working across multiple technical projects?”

“Tell me about a time you noticed an error in someone else's work. How did you approach them?”

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

“How do you handle repetitive debugging tasks without losing attention to detail?”

“Tell me about a technical project where you underestimated the scope. How did you recover?”

“How do you maintain focus and accuracy when working on long, tedious analytical tasks?”

“Describe a time you identified a hidden bug that others missed. What was your methodology?”

“What is the probability that the final passenger on a 100-seat plane gets their assigned seat if the first passenger chose randomly?”

“If you roll a fair die repeatedly until you roll a 6, what is the expected number of rolls? What if you require two 6s in a row?”

“Consider all 100-digit numbers. What is the last digit of the sum of the products of their non-zero digits?”

“Explain the mathematical intuition behind Lasso ($L_1$) versus Ridge ($L_2$) regularization. Why does $L_1$ induce sparsity?”

“How do you evaluate a machine learning model designed for non-stationary time series financial data?”

“What is the Delta of an at-the-money binary option as time to maturity approaches zero?”