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Data Engineer Interview Questions

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Data Engineer Interview Questions

Data engineers are IT professionals who are needed in almost every industry. Data engineers monitor data trends to determine best next steps for companies. A critical part of a data engineer job is to process raw data into usable data by creating data pipelines and building data systems.

Top Data Engineer Interview Questions & How To Answer

Question 1

Question #1: Can you describe in detail your level of expertise with programming languages?

How to answer
How to answer: Before the interview, review your resume and/or portfolio and make a list of the programs you are most proficient with. If you find that you are lacking the expertise in a program that the company predominately uses, describe yourself as a highly motivated self-starter who will work tirelessly to learn the program(s).
Question 2

Question #2: Explain data engineering in your own words.

How to answer
How to answer: Highlight your role in relation to the larger organization and other roles like data scientists to clearly define your contribution to the overall system of business. Clarify the difference between a database-centric engineer and a pipeline-centric engineer.
Question 3

Question #3: Can you describe your experience working with Apache Hadoop and cloud data management environments?

How to answer
How to answer: Research the company's software, data cloud products, and use of Apache Hadoop to be prepared for this inquiry. Data Engineers must be fluent in programming languages and data management systems used throughout the industry such as Apache Hadoop.

20,285 data engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Build and scale twitter. Specifically, create required tables, identify referential integrity constraints, create a query to find latest tweets for a person from all the persons she is following latest first, how will you manage paging (infinite scroll); How will you scale it?
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Data Engineer Manager

Interviewed at Collective Health

2.8★
Jan 12, 2018

Build and scale twitter. Specifically, create required tables, identify referential integrity constraints, create a query to find latest tweets for a person from all the persons she is following latest first, how will you manage paging (infinite scroll); How will you scale it?

1) Initial one round full of leadership related questions. Didn't expect a one hour full of leadership questions. This round was unexpected as recruiter didn't tell me that it's a leadership round. I was told this is a hiring manager screen where they wanted to check the fit. There were 2 hiring managers (of the 2 teams who were looking for a lead). 2) Initial coding screening - 2 Python coding questions - same as the ones that others mentioned in the Glassdoor. 1- data modeling question (social media site) and set of SQL questions against the data model. 3) Data pipeline system design interview. Asked high-level and low-level details of high data volume real-time pipeline. 4) Behavioral questions with cross-team based questions. 5) Technical round with ETL related question with SQL coding applied. One Python coding to build a grouping based ETL using Python. The output can be easily provided using SQL script. The challenge was to build the same using Python. Should be manageable somebody who's very hands-on. Unfortunately, I wasn't. Though I could write the pseudocode and think through the solution, I couldn't write the actual code within the time. 6) Design the data model for a ridesharing app and answer a set of questions using SQL. I underestimated the complexity of a couple of SQL questions in this round.
avatar

Senior Data Engineer

Interviewed at Meta

3.4★
Jun 25, 2023

1) Initial one round full of leadership related questions. Didn't expect a one hour full of leadership questions. This round was unexpected as recruiter didn't tell me that it's a leadership round. I was told this is a hiring manager screen where they wanted to check the fit. There were 2 hiring managers (of the 2 teams who were looking for a lead). 2) Initial coding screening - 2 Python coding questions - same as the ones that others mentioned in the Glassdoor. 1- data modeling question (social media site) and set of SQL questions against the data model. 3) Data pipeline system design interview. Asked high-level and low-level details of high data volume real-time pipeline. 4) Behavioral questions with cross-team based questions. 5) Technical round with ETL related question with SQL coding applied. One Python coding to build a grouping based ETL using Python. The output can be easily provided using SQL script. The challenge was to build the same using Python. Should be manageable somebody who's very hands-on. Unfortunately, I wasn't. Though I could write the pseudocode and think through the solution, I couldn't write the actual code within the time. 6) Design the data model for a ridesharing app and answer a set of questions using SQL. I underestimated the complexity of a couple of SQL questions in this round.

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