Data Engineer Interview Experiences & Questions
24 real Data Engineer interviews from 14 companies: what each round covers, the exact questions, and who got the offer.
What to expect · Data Engineer
Based on 24 real interviews
Data Engineer interviews by company
The Data Engineer interview process
Most common round types: Coding (10), Technical (10), Behavioral (7), Data Structures & Algorithms (3), Project Discussion (3), System Design (3).
Real Data Engineer interview questions
- Apache Spark, Databricks
- Tell me about yourself.
- 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 Slack.
- Design a system that flags schema drift.
- 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.
- Coding DSA, SQL
- Walk me through your experience in your recent company.
- Given users, books, and checkout data, find the number of users who checked out books in the geography category grouped by age.
- What product that you led are you most proud of and why?
- Tell me about your experience.
- 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.
- Spark internals, sql coding, projects
- How do you handle conflict at work?
- Find the number of people who checked out a book on the same day that another person returned that same book.
- SQL - Library schema
- basic pyspark questions
- 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.
- Behavioural , technical
- Why data engineering?
- 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.
- Python - 3 medium level questions
- how would you do data profiling
- Answer SQL questions based on the case study.
- Easy SQL question around active user and active dasher
- Tell me about a time you made a mistake.
- Tell me about a time you had conflict with your team lead or manager and how you resolved it.
- Write a function to read and process a CSV data file, and handle the case where the file is not found.
- Implement a function to return the top K tracks by play count efficiently.
- What is Xcom?
- Tell me about your past projects.
- Tell me about a time you improved a process in the organization that had business impact.
- Given employee, department, and salary data stored in a dictionary, find the second maximum salary for each department.
Showing 40 of 94 questions. Open any experience for every question and how the candidate answered.
Latest Data Engineer interview experiences
“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…”
“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”
“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…”
“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”
“Similar to SWE Internship recruiting, just easier LC and addition of SQL questions. Actually had 3 rounds, not 2.”
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 3.1/5 on average (medium), across 24 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?
71% of candidates with a final result got an offer (12 of 17).
What does the Data Engineer interview focus on?
The most common round types are Coding, Technical, Behavioral, Data Structures & Algorithms.