Interview prep

Data Engineer interview questions

13 questions data engineers 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 nightly pipeline fails intermittently and no one can reproduce the failure on demand. How do you track down the cause?
    Tests: debugging, pipeline design
  2. Walk me through how you would backfill six months of historical data into a table that pipelines are already reading from.
    Tests: pipeline design, system design
  3. How do you decide which data quality checks belong inside a pipeline versus which are the source system's responsibility?
    Tests: data quality, judgment
  4. A batch job that used to finish in an hour now takes most of the day. How do you approach speeding it up?
    Tests: performance, debugging

Situational

  1. An upstream team changes a table's schema without telling you and it breaks your pipeline. What do you do?
    Tests: data quality, communication
  2. You inherit a set of pipelines running on cron jobs and shell scripts. When do you move them to an orchestration tool and when do you leave them alone?
    Tests: system design, judgment
  3. A stakeholder asks for a dataset refreshed every few minutes, but the source system can't support that load. How do you handle the conversation?
    Tests: communication, tradeoff
  4. You discover that a pipeline has been silently writing incorrect values into a production table for weeks. Walk me through your response.
    Tests: ownership, data quality

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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Data Engineer interview questions — Gurus Consulting