Data Engineer Interview Questions

Review this list of 160 Data Engineer interview questions and answers verified by hiring managers and candidates.

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Asked at Discord • a year ago
Why do you want to work at Discord?
Data Engineer
Behavioral
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Data Engineer
Behavioral
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Asked at Meta • 19 days ago
Design a database schema for a ride sharing app.
Data Engineer
Data Modeling
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Data Engineer
Data Modeling
Asked at Adobe, Apple, Microsoft • a year ago
Top k frequent elements
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+3 more
1 answer
"Leetcode 347: Heap + Hashtable Follow up question: create heap with the length of K instead of N (more time complexity but less space )"
Chen J. - "Leetcode 347: Heap + Hashtable Follow up question: create heap with the length of K instead of N (more time complexity but less space )"See full answer
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+3 more
Asked at LinkedIn • a year ago
Design a data warehouse schema for LinkedIn.
Data Engineer
Data Modeling
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Data Engineer
Data Modeling
Design a data pipeline that complies with GDPR.
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
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Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design

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Asked at Databricks • a year ago
When should you use Delta Live Tables over standard data pipelines built on Spark and Delta Lake?
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
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Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
What types of indexes are in a relational database?
Data Engineer
Technical
1 answer
"i said there is hashed, clustered, non-clustered"
Erjan G. - "i said there is hashed, clustered, non-clustered"See full answer
Data Engineer
Technical
Design a system to ingest large amounts of JSON data from multiple S3 buckets
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
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Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
Explain the differences between Parquet and Avro.
Data Engineer
Technical
2 answers
"i did not know ,but the answer is parquet is column-oriented, avro is row-oriented"
Erjan G. - "i did not know ,but the answer is parquet is column-oriented, avro is row-oriented"See full answer
Data Engineer
Technical
Asked at Databricks • a year ago
When should you use a job cluster instead of an all-purpose cluster?
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
1 answer
"All purpose cluster remains up and running for longer duration irrespective of the job hence preferred for notebooks, adhoc work whereas job cluster spins up as per the submitted job and shuts down post the completion hence preferred for production scheduled workloads as it also offers compute isolation"
Nitish C. - "All purpose cluster remains up and running for longer duration irrespective of the job hence preferred for notebooks, adhoc work whereas job cluster spins up as per the submitted job and shuts down post the completion hence preferred for production scheduled workloads as it also offers compute isolation"See full answer
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
Asked at Meta, PwC • 19 days ago
How will you develop yourself professionally as a data engineer?
Data Engineer
Behavioral
1 answer
"with my worked experienced"
Ritika Y. - "with my worked experienced"See full answer
Data Engineer
Behavioral
Asked at Adobe, Apple, LinkedIn + 2 more • a year ago
Print all combinations of numbers from 1 to n that sum to n.
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+4 more
2 answers
"#include #include #include using namespace std; void printComs(int prev, int start, int end, int target) { if (start >= end) return; while (start target) { end--; } else { st"
Iris F. - "#include #include #include using namespace std; void printComs(int prev, int start, int end, int target) { if (start >= end) return; while (start target) { end--; } else { st"See full answer
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+4 more
Asked at LinkedIn, Oracle, TikTok • a year ago
Serialize and deserialize binary tree
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+2 more
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Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+2 more
Asked at Apple • a year ago
Sliding Window Maximum
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+1 more
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Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+1 more
Asked at Apple, Google, LinkedIn • a year ago
Calculate the height of a binary tree.
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+3 more
3 answers
"Recursion: 0 if NULL, else 1+max(height(left), height(right))"
Mohith J. - "Recursion: 0 if NULL, else 1+max(height(left), height(right))"See full answer
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+3 more
Explain the differences between wide and narrow dependencies in Apache Spark.
Data Engineer
Technical
1 answer
"i failed to answer, did not know"
Erjan G. - "i failed to answer, did not know"See full answer
Data Engineer
Technical
Asked at Adobe, TikTok • a year ago
Print all possible solutions to the N-Queens problem.
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
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Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
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What data tools have you worked with, and what specific projects did you use those tools for?
Data Engineer
Technical
1 answer
"I have worked with tools such as Hadoop, Oracle, DBeaver, and Databricks. I have used these tools at work when dealing with large datasets, data cleaning, data security, and creating models"
Aneesh D. - "I have worked with tools such as Hadoop, Oracle, DBeaver, and Databricks. I have used these tools at work when dealing with large datasets, data cleaning, data security, and creating models"See full answer
Data Engineer
Technical
Asked at Amazon • 2 years ago
Given an array of children’s ratings, assign at least one candy to each child so that higher-rated children get more than their neighbors, and return the minimum total candies needed.
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+3 more
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Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
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Given a large set of CSV files with thousands of paragraphs each, how would you detect duplicates within each file, and how would you scale this solution for many files?
Data Engineer
Coding
1 answer
"My brute force approach was to read them. Give a id to each paragraph and for each token count the number of time it has appeared. If any two rows look same , it is duplicated. Further , interviewer guided me that he will do it with hashing."
Payal B. - "My brute force approach was to read them. Give a id to each paragraph and for each token count the number of time it has appeared. If any two rows look same , it is duplicated. Further , interviewer guided me that he will do it with hashing."See full answer
Data Engineer
Coding