What is a Data Analyst at Voya Financial?

As a Data Analyst at Voya Financial, you are stepping into a role that is fundamental to our mission of helping Americans plan, invest, and protect their savings. Data is the lifeblood of our financial products, and this position places you at the intersection of quantitative analysis, investment strategy, and operational excellence. You will not just be querying databases; you will be uncovering insights that directly influence how we manage portfolios, assess risk, and deliver value to millions of customers.

The impact of this position is significant across our business lines. Whether you are working as an Investment Data Analyst supporting core asset management teams or as a Senior Quantitative Analyst, your work ensures that our portfolio managers, traders, and leadership have accurate, actionable intelligence. You will collaborate closely with investment teams, engineering pods, and product managers to build robust data pipelines, design predictive models, and create visualizations that demystify complex financial metrics.

Expect a highly collaborative, fast-paced environment where your technical skills must be matched by your financial acumen. At Voya Financial, we operate at massive scale, managing billions in assets under management (AUM). This means the data sets you will handle are vast, complex, and require meticulous attention to detail. If you are passionate about leveraging data to drive strategic financial decisions and want to work in a culture that deeply values work-life balance and continuous learning, this role will offer you a deeply rewarding career path.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for an interview at Voya Financial requires a strategic approach. We evaluate candidates holistically, looking for a blend of technical capability, domain expertise, and cultural alignment. You should structure your preparation around these core evaluation criteria:

Technical and Quantitative Proficiency – This evaluates your ability to extract, manipulate, and analyze large datasets. Interviewers will look for deep fluency in SQL, Python, or R, as well as your understanding of statistical modeling. You can demonstrate strength here by cleanly structuring your code and explaining the logic behind your analytical choices.

Financial Domain Knowledge – This assesses your understanding of the investment landscape. Depending on your specific role, you will be evaluated on your knowledge of equities, fixed income, portfolio performance metrics, and risk analysis. Strong candidates weave financial context seamlessly into their technical answers.

Problem-Solving and Ambiguity Navigation – This evaluates how you approach messy, real-world data challenges. Interviewers want to see how you break down complex questions, identify edge cases, and validate your findings. You can excel here by thinking out loud and outlining a clear, step-by-step methodology before diving into solutions.

Communication and Culture Fit – This measures your ability to translate complex data into clear business insights for non-technical stakeholders. Voya Financial places a premium on collaboration, transparency, and integrity. You will stand out by sharing examples of how you have successfully influenced decisions, mentored peers, or improved team processes.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Data Analyst at Voya Financial is designed to be rigorous but fair, giving you multiple opportunities to showcase your unique strengths. Typically, the process begins with an initial recruiter screen focused on your background, career aspirations, and basic alignment with the role's requirements. This is followed by a hiring manager screen, which dives deeper into your past projects, your technical toolkit, and your understanding of financial data.

If you progress, you will typically face a technical assessment. For quantitative and investment-focused roles, this often involves a take-home data challenge or a live coding session where you will analyze a financial dataset using SQL and Python. The final stage is a virtual or onsite panel interview. During this phase, you will meet with cross-functional stakeholders, including portfolio managers, senior analysts, and data engineers. The panel focuses on a mix of advanced technical concepts, system architecture, and behavioral scenarios.

Our interviewing philosophy emphasizes real-world applicability. We are less interested in trick questions and more focused on how you would handle the actual data challenges we face daily. Expect a conversational tone where interviewers act as collaborators, testing how well you partner with others to uncover insights.

This timeline illustrates the typical progression of our interview stages, moving from high-level behavioral screens to deep technical and cross-functional evaluations. You should use this visual to pace your preparation, focusing first on your core narrative and foundational skills, and reserving deep technical and case-study practice for the assessment and panel stages. Keep in mind that specific stages may vary slightly depending on whether you are interviewing for an entry-level Investment Data Analyst role or a Senior Quantitative Analyst position.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed in our interviews, you need to understand exactly what our teams are looking for. Below are the primary evaluation areas you will encounter, detailing what matters most and how to demonstrate strong performance.

Financial Data and Quantitative Analytics

Understanding the financial domain is just as critical as your technical skills. This area evaluates your ability to work with investment data, calculate performance metrics, and understand market dynamics. Strong performance means you can discuss financial concepts without needing extensive hand-holding from the interviewer.

Be ready to go over:

• Portfolio Metrics – Calculating returns, volatility, Alpha, Beta, and the Sharpe ratio.
• Data Quality and Integrity – Identifying anomalies in pricing data, corporate actions, or trading volumes.
• Risk Assessment – Understanding how data models track exposure and market risk.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Time-series forecasting, algorithmic trading backtesting, and quantitative factor modeling.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would calculate the daily return of a portfolio given a raw table of individual stock prices and daily weights."
• "If a portfolio manager notices a sudden, unexplained spike in a specific asset's risk profile on your dashboard, how do you investigate the underlying data?"
• "Explain the difference between time-weighted and money-weighted rates of return."

Data Manipulation and SQL Mastery

SQL is the foundational language for data retrieval at Voya Financial. We evaluate your ability to write efficient, scalable, and accurate queries. A strong candidate doesn't just write functional code; they write optimized code that handles edge cases gracefully.

Be ready to go over:

• Complex Joins and Aggregations – Merging multiple financial data streams (e.g., Bloomberg or FactSet data with internal trade logs).
• Window Functions – Using LEAD, LAG, RANK, and rolling averages to analyze time-series data.
• Query Optimization – Understanding execution plans, indexing, and how to rewrite slow queries.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Stored procedures, dynamic SQL, and database schema design.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a query to find the top three performing assets in each sector over the last 30 days."
• "How would you identify and remove duplicate trade records from a massive database without a unique primary key?"
• "Explain a time you had to optimize a query that was timing out. What steps did you take?"

Programming and Automation (Python/R)

Beyond querying, you will need to manipulate data, build models, and automate reporting using Python or R. This area tests your programmatic thinking and your familiarity with standard data science libraries. Strong performance looks like clean, modular code and a clear understanding of data structures.

Be ready to go over:

• Data Wrangling – Using pandas or dplyr to clean, filter, and transform messy datasets.
• Automation – Scripting repetitive tasks, such as generating daily investment reports.
• Data Visualization – Using libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, or integrating with tools like Tableau.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Building API integrations to fetch live market data, object-oriented programming for financial models.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How would you merge two large pandas DataFrames that have mismatched date formats and missing values?"
• "Describe a script you wrote to automate a manual reporting process. What was the impact?"
• "Write a Python function to calculate the 50-day moving average for a given stock."

Behavioral and Stakeholder Management

As a Data Analyst, you will frequently interact with non-technical stakeholders. This area evaluates your communication skills, your ability to push back constructively, and your alignment with Voya's collaborative culture. Strong candidates use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to tell compelling, concise stories.

Be ready to go over:

• Translating Complexity – Explaining highly technical data models to portfolio managers or executives.
• Managing Priorities – Handling competing requests from multiple investment teams.
• Navigating Mistakes – Owning up to data errors and implementing safeguards to prevent recurrence.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Leading cross-functional data governance initiatives.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you found a critical error in your data right before a major presentation. How did you handle it?"
• "Describe a situation where a stakeholder asked for a metric that you knew was flawed or misleading. How did you guide them to a better solution?"
• "How do you ensure your technical team and the business side are aligned on the goals of a new dashboard?"

Key Responsibilities

As a Data Analyst at Voya Financial, your day-to-day work is deeply integrated with our investment operations. You are primarily responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the analytical tools and dashboards that our portfolio managers rely on to make trading decisions. This involves querying massive databases, validating the integrity of incoming financial data from third-party vendors, and transforming raw numbers into clear, visual narratives.

Collaboration is a massive part of this role. You will work side-by-side with quantitative researchers to backtest investment strategies and with data engineers to ensure our pipelines are robust and scalable. When a new financial product is launched, you will be the point person for defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) and setting up the reporting infrastructure.

Additionally, you will drive continuous improvement initiatives. This might mean identifying a manual Excel-based process used by the operations team and replacing it with an automated Python script, or auditing our current Tableau dashboards to improve load times and user experience. Ultimately, your responsibility is to act as the bridge between raw financial data and strategic business action.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To thrive as a Data Analyst at Voya Financial, you need a specific blend of technical prowess and financial insight. We look for candidates who can hit the ground running while demonstrating the capacity to learn complex proprietary systems.

• Must-have technical skills – Expert-level SQL for complex data extraction. High proficiency in Python (specifically pandas and NumPy) or R. Extensive experience with data visualization tools like Tableau or PowerBI.
• Must-have domain knowledge – A solid understanding of financial markets, investment vehicles (equities, fixed income, derivatives), and portfolio performance metrics.
• Experience level – Typically, 3 to 5 years of experience in data analytics for mid-level roles, while Senior Quantitative Analyst positions require 5 to 8+ years, often with a background in asset management, banking, or fintech.
• Soft skills – Exceptional communication skills, a high degree of intellectual curiosity, and the ability to manage multiple stakeholders with competing priorities.
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with financial data providers (Bloomberg, FactSet, Morningstar), familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), and a background in statistical modeling or machine learning.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the types of challenges you will face during your interviews at Voya Financial. While you should not memorize answers, you should use these to practice identifying patterns, structuring your thoughts, and refining your technical explanations.

SQL and Data Processing

These questions test your ability to write efficient queries and handle the nuances of financial datasets, such as time-series data and missing values.

• Write a SQL query to calculate the cumulative return of a stock over a specific period.
• How would you use window functions to find the second highest daily trading volume for each asset class?
• Explain the difference between a LEFT JOIN and an INNER JOIN, and provide a scenario where using the wrong one would distort portfolio data.
• Given a table of historical prices with missing weekend dates, how would you forward-fill the Friday prices to Saturday and Sunday using SQL?
• Walk me through how you would optimize a query that joins three tables with over 50 million rows each.

Financial and Quantitative Concepts

These questions evaluate your understanding of the investment landscape and your ability to apply mathematical concepts to financial data.

• How do you calculate the Sharpe ratio, and what does it tell a portfolio manager?
• Explain the concept of Beta. How would you calculate it using Python?
• If you were asked to build a dashboard tracking fixed-income performance, what key metrics would you include?
• What is survivor bias in financial data, and how do you account for it when backtesting a strategy?
• Describe a time you used statistical analysis to identify a trend or anomaly in market data.

Behavioral and Scenario-Based

These questions assess your communication, stakeholder management, and cultural fit within our collaborative environment.

• Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex quantitative model to a non-technical stakeholder.
• Describe a situation where you disagreed with a portfolio manager about how data should be interpreted. How did you resolve it?
• Walk me through a project where the initial data requirements were highly ambiguous. How did you define the scope?
• Tell me about a time your data analysis led to a direct change in business strategy.
• How do you prioritize your tasks when multiple investment teams need urgent data pulls at the same time?

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the technical assessment, and how much time should I spend preparing? The technical assessment is rigorous but practical, focusing on the actual tools you will use daily (SQL and Python). You should expect to spend 1-2 weeks brushing up on advanced SQL window functions and pandas data manipulation, specifically applying them to financial datasets.

Q: What differentiates a successful candidate from an average one at Voya Financial? Successful candidates seamlessly bridge the gap between technology and finance. An average candidate can write a script to calculate a metric; a standout candidate understands why that metric matters to the portfolio manager and proactively suggests better ways to visualize the risk.

Q: What is the culture and working style like for Data Analysts here? Voya Financial is highly regarded for its collaborative culture and excellent work-life balance. While the work is fast-paced and tied to market hours, leadership deeply respects personal time. Expect a supportive environment where continuous learning and cross-training are highly encouraged.

Q: What is the typical timeline from the initial screen to an offer? The end-to-end process typically takes between 3 to 5 weeks. We move as quickly as possible, but scheduling the final panel with senior investment stakeholders can sometimes add a few days to the timeline.

Q: Are these roles remote, hybrid, or onsite? Most Data Analyst roles at Voya Financial, particularly those based in our New York or Atlanta hubs, operate on a hybrid schedule. You should expect to be in the office 2 to 3 days a week to foster collaboration with the investment and engineering teams.

Other General Tips

• Tie Technical Answers to Business Value: Whenever you answer a coding or data question, append a sentence about the business impact. For example, "I would optimize the query this way so the portfolio managers can get their morning reports 15 minutes faster before market open."
• Brush Up on Investment Basics: Even if you are a master coder, review basic investment vehicles, asset classes, and risk metrics. Demonstrating a baseline understanding of the financial markets builds immediate trust with the hiring manager.
• Master the STAR Method: For behavioral questions, strictly follow the Situation, Task, Action, Result format. Be specific about your individual contribution (use "I" instead of "we") and quantify your results whenever possible.
• Think Out Loud During Coding: If you hit a roadblock during a technical screen, communicate your thought process. Interviewers are often more interested in how you debug and solve problems than whether you write perfect syntax on the first try.

Summary & Next Steps

Taking on a Data Analyst role at Voya Financial is a unique opportunity to drive meaningful impact within a leading financial institution. You will be at the forefront of leveraging data to optimize investment strategies, manage risk, and ultimately help millions of people secure their financial futures. The work is challenging, deeply analytical, and highly visible to senior leadership, making it an excellent catalyst for career growth.

As you prepare, focus heavily on the intersection of SQL, Python, and financial domain knowledge. Practice structuring your thoughts clearly, writing clean code, and translating complex data into actionable business stories. Remember that our interviewers want you to succeed; they are looking for a collaborative partner who can bring technical rigor to our investment processes.

The compensation data above reflects the wide variance in our analytics roles. An entry-to-mid-level Investment Data Analyst will generally fall into the $94,500 -$132,500 range, while a highly specialized Senior Quantitative Analyst with portfolio management responsibilities commands a significantly higher band ($220,000 -$250,000). You should use this data to understand how your specific background, location, and the exact requisition you applied for align with our compensation structure.

Approach your upcoming interviews with confidence. Your technical foundation has gotten you this far, and with targeted preparation, you can confidently demonstrate why you are the right fit for our team. For additional practice scenarios, peer insights, and technical deep-dives, be sure to explore the resources available on Dataford. Good luck—you have everything it takes to excel!