Interview prep

BI Developer interview questions

13 questions bi developers get asked, grouped by type. Under each one are the skills it is really testing, so you can pick a story from your own work that shows them.

Technical

  1. A dashboard that used to load in seconds now takes over a minute. How do you find and fix the cause?
    Tests: performance, sql
  2. How do you decide between a wide denormalized table and a star schema when building a new reporting layer?
    Tests: data modeling, judgment
  3. How do you decide which chart type actually communicates a given dataset, rather than defaulting to whatever's easiest to build?
    Tests: reporting, judgment
  4. Walk me through how you'd set up incremental data refresh for a large fact table instead of reloading it fully every time.
    Tests: performance, data modeling

Situational

  1. Two reports built by different teams define active user differently and stakeholders are confused about which to trust. What do you do?
    Tests: reporting, communication
  2. A scheduled report refresh fails overnight and the morning dashboard shows stale data with no visible warning. How do you respond?
    Tests: reporting, ownership
  3. A department head asks for a new dashboard but struggles to describe what decisions it needs to support. How do you approach the build?
    Tests: communication, business context
  4. Business users want to build their own reports in the tool, but inconsistent metric definitions keep showing up as a result. How do you balance self-service with consistency?
    Tests: data modeling, judgment

Behavioral

  1. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a coworker and how you handled it.
    Tests: conflict resolution, communication
  2. Describe a project or task that did not go well and what you did about it.
    Tests: ownership, reflection
  3. Give an example of persuading someone to adopt an idea they initially resisted.
    Tests: influence, communication
  4. Walk me through how you decided what to work on when you had more requests than time.
    Tests: prioritisation, judgment
  5. Tell me about a time you had to learn something new quickly to get a job done.
    Tests: learning agility, ownership
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BI Developer interview questions — Gurus Consulting