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.

20,247 data engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Three SQL queries one was to JOIN two tables to pull required results. Second was about Group & Order by. Third was Window query all very simple and basic. One Python related to write a function to sort an array so it produce only odd numbers.
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Data Engineer

Interviewed at Amazon

3.5
Jun 16, 2021

Three SQL queries one was to JOIN two tables to pull required results. Second was about Group & Order by. Third was Window query all very simple and basic. One Python related to write a function to sort an array so it produce only odd numbers.

It wasn't the sort of interview you could characterise by listing questions. Each interview probed a different facet of the job (e.g. database knowledge, customer skills, coding, etc.). They were all disconnected: I had the impression I was interviewing for 8 different jobs.
avatar

Principal Data Engineer

Interviewed at Amazon

3.5
Jan 13, 2021

It wasn't the sort of interview you could characterise by listing questions. Each interview probed a different facet of the job (e.g. database knowledge, customer skills, coding, etc.). They were all disconnected: I had the impression I was interviewing for 8 different jobs.

telephonic with technical and SQL coding ) 1 hr Difference b/w SQL and HDFS How do you read, map and reduce and text file in spark ETL How do you create tables in Hive Group by and union with Customer tables Size of data in Hadoop cluster Data warehousing Primarily focused for 45 min on Hive, Spark, Hadoop, HDFS, data warehousing and ETL And, no status on the interview yet, but even though I answered all the questions but, I failed in one coding question of 2 so, I don’t have any hopes for next rounds. It may be useful for you all. Here is the question I got on Amazon Interview Input: SALES_MONTH | PRODUCT_ID |SALE_AMOUNT JAN - 2020 |P1 | 100 FEB - 2020 |P2 | 200 JAN - 2020 |P3 | 500 MARCH - 2020 |P4 | 10 OUTPUT SALES_MONTH | P1_TOTAL |P2_TOTAL JAN - 2020 |100 | 0 FEB - 2020 |0 | 200 MARCH - 2020 |10 | 0
avatar

Big Data Engineer

Interviewed at Amazon

3.5
Sep 3, 2020

telephonic with technical and SQL coding ) 1 hr Difference b/w SQL and HDFS How do you read, map and reduce and text file in spark ETL How do you create tables in Hive Group by and union with Customer tables Size of data in Hadoop cluster Data warehousing Primarily focused for 45 min on Hive, Spark, Hadoop, HDFS, data warehousing and ETL And, no status on the interview yet, but even though I answered all the questions but, I failed in one coding question of 2 so, I don’t have any hopes for next rounds. It may be useful for you all. Here is the question I got on Amazon Interview Input: SALES_MONTH | PRODUCT_ID |SALE_AMOUNT JAN - 2020 |P1 | 100 FEB - 2020 |P2 | 200 JAN - 2020 |P3 | 500 MARCH - 2020 |P4 | 10 OUTPUT SALES_MONTH | P1_TOTAL |P2_TOTAL JAN - 2020 |100 | 0 FEB - 2020 |0 | 200 MARCH - 2020 |10 | 0

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