Top Data Engineer Interview Questions

Review this list of 167 Data Engineer interview questions and answers verified by hiring managers and candidates.

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Asked at Microsoft • a year ago
What is SQL?
Data Engineer
SQL
+2 more
2 answers
"SQL is structured query language."
Rafia M. - "SQL is structured query language."See full answer
Data Engineer
SQL
+2 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 Discord • 2 years ago
Why did you become an engineer?
Data Engineer
Behavioral
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Data Engineer
Behavioral
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Asked at Databricks • 2 years ago
How would you handle a task in a nightly job that fails unexpectedly during 10 percent of the runs?
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
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Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
Asked at Atlassian • 9 months ago
Why do you want to work at Atlassian?
Data Engineer
Behavioral
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Data Engineer
Behavioral
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Asked at Databricks • 2 years ago
What is delta lake?
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
1 answer
"Delta lake is a metadata layer on top of cloud storage which helps giving datalake transactional capabilities. It helps implement upsert/merge as it conforms a schema to the data assets stored in cloud. It also offers various other capabilities like liquid clustering,time travel, schema evolution,deletes."
Nitish C. - "Delta lake is a metadata layer on top of cloud storage which helps giving datalake transactional capabilities. It helps implement upsert/merge as it conforms a schema to the data assets stored in cloud. It also offers various other capabilities like liquid clustering,time travel, schema evolution,deletes."See full answer
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
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 Discord • 2 years 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 Databricks • 2 years 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
Asked at Databricks • 2 years 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 Apple • 2 years ago
Sliding Window Maximum
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+1 more
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Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
+1 more
What is Pyspark?
Data Engineer
Data Modeling
2 answers
"na"
Sonveer K. - "na"See full answer
Data Engineer
Data Modeling
Asked at LinkedIn, Oracle, TikTok • 2 years ago
Serialize and deserialize binary tree
Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
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Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
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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
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Data Engineer
Data Structures & Algorithms
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Asked at Meta, PwC • 7 months 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 Amazon • 2 years ago
Design a data pipeline that updates hourly and powers a dashboard showing the most common Alexa user requests, broken down by country.
Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
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Data Engineer
Data Pipeline Design
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
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
Asked at Meta • 2 months ago
Design a database schema for a ride sharing app.
Data Engineer
Data Modeling
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Data Engineer
Data Modeling