At United Airlines, data is the engine that drives customer engagement, loyalty, and operational efficiency. As a Marketing Analytics Specialist, you will sit at the intersection of marketing strategy and data science, transforming raw passenger, campaign, and transactional data into actionable commercial insights. Your work directly impacts how United Airlines communicates with millions of travelers globally, optimizes its multi-million dollar marketing spend, and refines its loyalty offerings, such as the renowned MileagePlus program.

This role is critical to maintaining United Airlines' competitive edge in a highly dynamic aviation industry. Whether you are analyzing the performance of targeted email campaigns, evaluating the conversion rates of digital channels, or building predictive models to understand customer lifetime value, your insights will guide key business decisions. You will work closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Loyalty, Data Science, and B2B corporate sales to design data-driven strategies that enhance passenger experiences and maximize revenue.

The scale of data at United Airlines is massive, encompassing booking histories, digital interactions, and real-time travel patterns. To succeed in this role, you must possess a unique blend of technical proficiency, business acumen, and storytelling ability. You will not only write queries to extract complex datasets but also translate those numbers into compelling narratives that influence senior leadership and shape the future of air travel marketing.

To help you prepare effectively, we have analyzed real interview experiences to identify the most common question patterns. The interview process at United Airlines evaluates both your technical capabilities and your behavioral alignment with the company's customer-first values.

Behavioral & Situational

These questions assess your past experiences, how you collaborate with stakeholders, and how you manage challenging work environments.

• Tell me about a time when you had to work with a difficult stakeholder to deliver a data project.
• Describe a situation where you had to manage multiple competing deadlines. How did you prioritize your tasks?

Preparing for an interview at United Airlines requires a balanced approach. You must demonstrate both technical competency and the communication skills necessary to collaborate across a global organization.

Role-Related Knowledge – You must show a strong grasp of marketing metrics (such as CPA, LTV, ROI, and conversion rates) alongside solid technical fundamentals. Be ready to explain how technical data pipelines support overarching marketing strategies.

Problem-Solving Ability – Interviewers want to see how you structure your thoughts when faced with complex, open-ended business problems. Focus on breaking down issues systematically and using data to validate your hypotheses.

Behavioral & Cultural Alignment – United Airlines values collaboration, resilience, and customer focus. You should prepare stories that demonstrate your ability to work effectively in a matrixed team environment and handle shifting operational priorities.

Communication & Influence – As an analyst, your value lies in your ability to influence decisions. You will be evaluated on how clearly you explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and construct data-driven arguments.

The interview process for the Marketing Analytics Specialist role at United Airlines is designed to evaluate both your technical execution and your behavioral fit. While the process is straightforward, candidates often report that it can be extensive, sometimes spanning up to four rounds even for junior or mid-level positions. This thoroughness ensures that you possess the analytical rigor and collaborative mindset required to thrive in their fast-paced environment.

The journey typically begins with an initial phone screen with a recruiter to review your background and interest in the airline industry. This is followed by a series of virtual interviews, which may include a live, monitored case study and multiple behavioral rounds. The behavioral rounds are highly structured and are often conducted by different interviewers, including peer analysts, hiring managers, and senior leadership, to gain a well-rounded perspective of your working style.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression from your initial application to the final decision. Candidates should use this roadmap to pace their preparation, focusing first on core behavioral stories and SQL fundamentals, before moving on to case study practice as they advance to the later rounds. Note that exact stages may vary slightly depending on the specific team, location, and seniority of the role.

To secure an offer at United Airlines, you must perform consistently across several key evaluation areas. Understanding what interviewers look for in each area will help you tailor your preparation.

Behavioral & Cultural Fit

The behavioral interviews at United Airlines are designed to assess how you handle real-world workplace scenarios. The team looks for candidates who are resilient, collaborative, and capable of navigating the complexities of a large corporate environment.

Be ready to go over:

• The STAR Method – Structure your responses by clearly defining the Situation, Task, Action, and Result, ensuring you highlight your personal contribution.
• Handling Conflict – Be prepared to discuss how you resolve disagreements with stakeholders or team members productively.
• Adaptability – Share examples of how you managed sudden changes in project scope or organizational priorities.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Navigating matrixed organizations, managing up to senior leadership, and driving consensus across disjointed teams.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time when you had to deliver a project with incomplete data."
• "Describe a situation where your recommendation was challenged by a stakeholder. How did you handle it?"

Core Technical Skills

While this is a marketing-focused role, United Airlines expects its analysts to be highly technical. You must be comfortable working with databases to extract, clean, and analyze customer and campaign data.

Be ready to go over:

• SQL Fundamentals – Mastering joins, aggregations, subqueries, and common table expressions (CTEs).
• Data Visualization – Understanding how to present data clearly using tools like Tableau or Power BI.
• Data Quality – Identifying and resolving inconsistencies, duplicates, and missing values in large datasets.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Window functions, database optimization, and basic statistical scripting in Python or R.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a SQL query to find the top three marketing channels by revenue for each month."
• "How would you handle a dataset where 20% of the customer email fields are missing?"

Marketing Case Analysis

For some marketing analyst pipelines, you will face a live case study. This exercise is designed to test your business intuition, structured thinking, and ability to perform under pressure.

Be ready to go over:

• Problem Structuring – Breaking down an ambiguous business goal (e.g., "increase loyalty program sign-ups") into testable hypotheses.
• Metric Selection – Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure campaign success.
• A/B Testing Design – Setting up rigorous experiments, establishing control groups, and calculating sample sizes.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Multi-touch attribution modeling, media mix modeling, and customer lifetime value estimation.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "We want to launch a new promotional offer for corporate travelers. How would you design an experiment to test its effectiveness?"
• "Analyze this mock dataset of email campaign metrics and identify which customer segments we should target next."