Data Engineer Interview Questions

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.

20,205 data engineer interview questions shared by candidates

A developer on the team wrote an ETL that runs once a day as a Spark job. Every day it reads a CSV file that shows the total value of each customer's transactions of that day and writes them as a parquet file partitioned by date and customer id. Below you can see an example of the CSV file. Note that each customer has one entry representing the total transaction value it did on that day. However, sometimes the CSV file contains a correction for a sum reported in the past. For example - this file represents the transactions on 1/10. You can see that customer 1002 has 2 entries. One for 1/10 and one for 30/9. This means that the total sum of transactions the customer did on 1/10 is 70, but the total sum of transactions it did on 30/9 was 40 and this sum should replace the value already reported on 30/9. current date file: 2020-10-01 date,customer,price 2020-10-01,1000,40 2020-10-01,1001,10 2020-09-30,1002,40 2020-10-01,1002,70 2020-10-01,1003,10 2020-09-29,1004,10 2020-10-01,1004,10 This function represents the ETL. It runs once a day with a string representing the current day. It reads the CSV file, does some transformations, and writes it. Please help us find the bug in the code above, and return the right results
avatar

Senior Data Engineer

Interviewed at AppsFlyer

4.1
Mar 16, 2023

A developer on the team wrote an ETL that runs once a day as a Spark job. Every day it reads a CSV file that shows the total value of each customer's transactions of that day and writes them as a parquet file partitioned by date and customer id. Below you can see an example of the CSV file. Note that each customer has one entry representing the total transaction value it did on that day. However, sometimes the CSV file contains a correction for a sum reported in the past. For example - this file represents the transactions on 1/10. You can see that customer 1002 has 2 entries. One for 1/10 and one for 30/9. This means that the total sum of transactions the customer did on 1/10 is 70, but the total sum of transactions it did on 30/9 was 40 and this sum should replace the value already reported on 30/9. current date file: 2020-10-01 date,customer,price 2020-10-01,1000,40 2020-10-01,1001,10 2020-09-30,1002,40 2020-10-01,1002,70 2020-10-01,1003,10 2020-09-29,1004,10 2020-10-01,1004,10 This function represents the ETL. It runs once a day with a string representing the current day. It reads the CSV file, does some transformations, and writes it. Please help us find the bug in the code above, and return the right results

1. Get the top 10 IP addresses from 1TB data files having semi-structured data using map reduce. 2. The intersection of two lists, with the output being in a sorted order. 3. Third highest salary in each department (SQL)
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Data Engineer

Interviewed at LinkedIn

3.8
Apr 20, 2017

1. Get the top 10 IP addresses from 1TB data files having semi-structured data using map reduce. 2. The intersection of two lists, with the output being in a sorted order. 3. Third highest salary in each department (SQL)

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