Skip to contentSkip to footer

Sr Data Engineer Interview Questions

Salaries
Interviews

2,563 sr data engineer interview questions shared by candidates

SQL questions involving simple aggregations and joins, but my interviewer got caught up on the intricacies of date formatting (that wasn’t part of the question). Since I code primarily in SparkSQL and PySpark he got bent out of shape about how my answer wasn’t correct. Huge waste of my time. There was also a question about calculating rolling averages where the “solution” was a cross join (an antipattern that almost certainly wouldn’t work in a prod environment) so this gives you a sense of what we’re dealing with. The whole thing felt like it was something dreamed up by someone with 2-3 years of data engineering experience who is fully on the Dunning Kruger curve and thinks they’re a lot smarter than they actually are.
avatar

Sr Data Engineer

Interviewed at Shopify

3.4★
Oct 17, 2025

SQL questions involving simple aggregations and joins, but my interviewer got caught up on the intricacies of date formatting (that wasn’t part of the question). Since I code primarily in SparkSQL and PySpark he got bent out of shape about how my answer wasn’t correct. Huge waste of my time. There was also a question about calculating rolling averages where the “solution” was a cross join (an antipattern that almost certainly wouldn’t work in a prod environment) so this gives you a sense of what we’re dealing with. The whole thing felt like it was something dreamed up by someone with 2-3 years of data engineering experience who is fully on the Dunning Kruger curve and thinks they’re a lot smarter than they actually are.

Tech interview consisted of two blocks. The first one was about reviewing some code written in Python; pointing out potential flaws in the design and reasoning about how to fix them. The code snippet looked like a module that a Data Scientist that lacks understanding of software engineering would write. Second part was about writing a sql query that would filter and join a couple of tables to compute a metric with multiple levels of aggregation.
avatar

Senior Data Engineer

Interviewed at Volvo Cars

3.7★
Nov 18, 2022

Tech interview consisted of two blocks. The first one was about reviewing some code written in Python; pointing out potential flaws in the design and reasoning about how to fix them. The code snippet looked like a module that a Data Scientist that lacks understanding of software engineering would write. Second part was about writing a sql query that would filter and join a couple of tables to compute a metric with multiple levels of aggregation.

Viewing 1341 - 1350 interview questions

Glassdoor has 2,563 interview questions and reports from Sr data engineer interviews. Prepare for your interview. Get hired. Love your job.