Data Engineer Interview Experiences & Questions
31 real Data Engineer interviews from 18 companies: what each round covers, the exact questions, and who got the offer.
What to expect · Data Engineer
Based on 31 real interviews
Data Engineer interviews by company
The Data Engineer interview process
Most common round types: Technical (13), Coding (12), Behavioral (10), System Design (6), Project Discussion (4), Data Structures & Algorithms (3).
Real Data Engineer interview questions
- Tell me about your experience.
- Tell me about yourself.
- Design Slack.
- Given a library-style schema with books, users, and check-in/check-out data, write a query to find for each user the number of books they checked out and did not return before the due date, and return the username and…
- Design a data bricks data pipeline
- What would you do when there is a customer drop or a specific metric drop in the dashboard for an Instagram-like product?
- Python: Sliding Window (Max 7 day sale (SUM) and when did it start)
- Design a data model for an Uber ride app.
- Tell me about a time you optimized a team's workflow.
- How do you collaborate with engineers?
- Walk me through your experience in your recent company.
- What product that you led are you most proud of and why?
- Given users, books, and checkout data, find the number of users who checked out books in the geography category grouped by age.
- Given a small set of unstructured data in aws s3 buckets, how to connect and integrate with databricks?
- Based on your product sense answer, design a data model for that use case.
- Top 5 restaurants on the basis of rating (All SQL questions were based on a huge 5 table data model)
- Given a stream of Uber ride requests, compute the number of ride requests in every 15-minute window.
- How would you decide on a KPI for building a system and how would you improve it?
- Tell me about your biggest failure.
- What is your experience with Databricks?
- SQL - Library schema
- Find the number of people who checked out a book on the same day that another person returned that same book.
- Design a system that flags schema drift.
- Answer generic Python questions.
- Percentage if restaurants which serve only Vegetarian food.
- Design tables and a processing pipeline to support daily metrics such as unique listeners, play count, total listening time, and top artists by country.
- What's the difference between Bigquery and Snowflake?
- Willing to travel
- Python - 3 medium level questions
- Given a list of strings, find the number of occurrences of the second letter of the first word, and return the character and its count.
- basic pyspark questions
- Answer SQL questions based on the case study.
- Easy SQL question around active user and active dasher
- Apache Spark, Databricks
- How do you handle conflict at work?
- Tell me about a decision you made based on your instincts.
- Write a function to read and process a CSV data file, and handle the case where the file is not found.
- how would you do data profiling
- Walk me through your resume.
- Why data engineering?
Showing 40 of 110 questions. Open any experience for every question and how the candidate answered.
Latest Data Engineer interview experiences
“Overall: The interview was well structured and closely matched the role. It covered SQL and BigQuery performance, dbt pipelines, data modelling, Airflow, data quality, Python, debugging, cost, and…”
“The interview was mostly technical. And almost all the questions were focused towards Databricks. for the cloud stack, mostly focused on AWS.”
“It was a video interview but the interviewer did not turn on his video. It was completely technical fully focused around Databricks.”
“IT was a AI based interview, where the interviewrs asked me some technical question related to spark, partitons, How did i managed a end to end data pipeline, how did si deploy data infrastructure”
“all went well, no problem at all, everything was smooth. interviewr was nice & soft spoken. Team was nice”
“Interviews are aligned with what mentioned in the Job description. Expect some system design questions as well.”
“The overall interview process was incredibly smooth, straightforward, and well-organized from start to finish. The recruiter was exceptionally friendly, responsive, and did a fantastic job of…”
“I definitely had good preparation on LP question which is one of the most important area because company focuses on this a lot”
“Overall, I’d rate the process as smooth and structured, with four rounds in total: two technical rounds focused on SQL and DSA, one system/design round, and one hiring manager discussion. The…”
“The recruiter mentioned that I will be heavily judged on my Communication as well as problem-solving. What went well: 1. I solved all the questions. 2. I was communicating very well. I wasn't able…”
“The interview is definitely hard, but achievable with preparation because the timing is very less. In the screening, you get five Python and five SQL in one hour, and you need to pass at least three…”
“The technical round covered SQL and data structures. The SQL portion felt more familiar, while the linked list question required additional thought. Time management was the biggest challenge.”
“Technical screening wasn't that hard. Have to solve 3 SQL and 3 Python. You are fighting against the time.”
“The interview went well as I expected the questions where L2. They asked about project and challenges during the project and how i overcame those challenges while collaborating with teammates”
“Video recording with a couple questions. Panel style interview with 2 people. Final phone interview.”
“Overall, the interview process was quite well-structured, with clear stages and expectations. The interviewers were professional and the conversations were generally focused and relevant.”
“Overall, the interview process was well organized and professional. The interviewers were engaged, respectful of time, and provided opportunities to discuss both technical and behavioral…”
“What stood out to me is that every loop round started with product sense, then I had to turn that answer into a data model, and from that they jumped straight into SQL and Python. One case was even…”
“It was smooth experience, I had a panel of 4 people, my current manager, senior data engineer, director of Data Analytics department and HR”
“The process is basically easy, the idea of interview is to check your expirences alligning to there requirements. as my role, was kept on hold led me to get ghosted on my profile.”
“The process was bizarre. During the recruiter call, they said the next interview will be behavioral. But it was pure technical. Asked lot of networking questions and system designs”
“Friendly interviewers, thorough with their questions. Questions focused on GCP, BigQuery, Apache Beam (Dataflow)”
“No unique tricks to prepare for (at least from my experience). What went well was imagining myself in the role before going into the interview. I should've been a bit more professional compared to…”
“The process was rigorous. SQL speed and precision is the key. In depth product sense, modelling concepts are needed.”
“Interviewer were all really nice. Technical portion requires to be thorough in explaining thought process”
“The process was overall good, recruiter provided lots of advice and pointers for what to study. The biggest challenege is the pressure and time crunch on making sure you can answer everything but…”
“Process was good they tested your basics and coding capability . They asked more spark internals project based and databricks internals”
“Common big tech interview process. Nothing out of the ordinary. Prepare some data modeling, data structures and AI focus. Most questions tie back to behavioral interviewing.”
“Process was smooth but recruiter was very slow. Loop was only kept after 3 weeks of coding screening. Overall interview was centred around past project and spark optimisation”
“It was very structured, until the system design. For the system design round it was not clear shat signals they are looking for in a DE. It's mostly conversational with just pseudocode in the end.”
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are in the Data Engineer interview?
Candidates report a typical 3 rounds, usually including a recruiter screen, online assessment, phone screen, technical round.
How hard is the Data Engineer interview?
Candidates rate it 3.0/5 on average (medium), across 31 interviews.
How long does the Data Engineer hiring process take?
About 2 weeks from first contact to decision, based on reported timelines.
What percentage of Data Engineer candidates get an offer?
61% of candidates with a final result got an offer (14 of 23).
What does the Data Engineer interview focus on?
The most common round types are Technical, Coding, Behavioral, System Design.