Investigating Risk Spikes in SQL | Dataford Interview Questions

Welcome to your interview for the Data Analyst role at Voya Financial.

The question is on your right: Investigating Risk Spikes in SQL. Take a moment with it first.

Talk your thinking through with me if you like - when you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen. You have three graded attempts to score 7/10 or better.

Problem

Context

At a firm like Northstar Capital, a portfolio manager may see a sudden jump in an asset's risk score on a dashboard and ask whether the spike reflects real market movement or bad underlying data.

Core question

Explain how you would investigate the underlying data using SQL. Your answer should cover:

How you would validate the spike against historical values
Which tables you would join to trace the risk metric back to source inputs
How you would check for missing, duplicated, stale, or outlier records
How you would isolate whether the issue comes from market data, position data, or calculation logic

Scope guidance

The interviewer expects a practical investigation framework, not just a single query. Discuss the sequence of checks, the SQL techniques you would use in PostgreSQL, and how you would distinguish a true business event from a data pipeline or modeling issue.