Data Engineer Interview Questions
Practice 160 real Data Engineer interview questions for 2026. Covers companies like Meta, TikTok, RBC Royal Bank, and Point72 — real questions from actual interviews with detailed solutions. This collection of Data Engineer interview questions is designed for hands‑on interview preparation: expect live SQL and Python exercises, pipeline design and debugging, and case problems that test data modeling, throughput and latency tradeoffs. What’s distinctive about data engineering interviews is the mix of coding plus systems thinking: interviewers evaluate SQL fluency and data modeling, end‑to‑end pipeline architecture (streaming, Spark, Kafka) and data reliability/observability. Meta, TikTok, RBC Royal Bank, and Point72 are actively hiring for this role and commonly test scalable ETL design, warehouse/schema design and production reliability. To prepare, practice medium‑to‑hard SQL, build a few Spark/streaming exercises, sketch architecture tradeoffs for high‑throughput pipelines, and rehearse concise behavioral stories that show ownership and incident response.
"I got asked a hardcore MCM DP question and I saw it on PracHub as well. Solved that question in 5 minutes. Without PracHub I doubt I could solve it in 5 hours. Though somehow didn't get hired, perhaps I guess I solved it too fast? /s"
"Believe me i'm a student here jn US. Recently interviewed for MSFT. They asked me exact question from PracHub. I saw it the night before and ignored it cause why waste time on random sites. I legit wanna go back and redo this whole thing if I had chance. Not saying will work for everyone but there is certainly some merit to that website. And i'm gonna use it in future prep from now on like lc tagged"
"10 years of experience but never worked at a top company. PracHub's senior-level questions helped me break into FAANG at 35. Age is just a number."
"I was skeptical about the 'real questions' claim, so I put it to the test. I searched for the exact question I got grilled on at my last Meta onsite... and it was right there. Word for word."
"Got a Google recruiter call on Monday, interview on Friday. Crammed PracHub for 4 days. Passed every round. This platform is a miracle worker."
"I've used LC, Glassdoor, and random Discords. Nothing comes close to the accuracy here. The questions are actually current — that's what got me. Felt like I had a cheat sheet during the interview."
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"Legit the only resource you need. TC went from 180k -> 350k. Just memorize the top 50 for your target company and you're golden."
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"Literally just signed a $600k offer. I only had 2 weeks to prep, so I focused entirely on the company-tagged lists here. If you're targeting L5+, don't overthink it."
"Coaches and bootcamp prep courses cost around $200-300 but PracHub Premium is actually less than a Netflix subscription. And it landed me a $178K offer."
"I honestly don't know how you guys gather so many real interview questions. It's almost scary. I walked into my Amazon loop and recognized 3 out of 4 problems from your database."
"Discovered PracHub 10 days before my interview. By day 5, I stopped being nervous. By interview day, I was actually excited to show what I knew."
"I recently cleared Uber interviews (strong hire in the design round) and all the questions were present in prachub."
"The search is what sold me. I typed in a really niche DP problem I got asked last year and it actually came up, full breakdown and everything. These guys are clearly updating it constantly."
Design an Incremental Rolling-Metrics Data Pipeline
Design an Incremental Rolling-Metrics Data Pipeline Design a production pipeline that computes rolling-window metrics for approximately 1,000 tickers ...
Model Effective-Dated Compliance Restrictions for Securities
Model Effective-Dated Compliance Restrictions for Securities Design a relational system that maps compliance restrictions to every affected security. ...
Build a Self-Service Market Data Discovery and Support Layer
Build a Self-Service Market Data Discovery and Support Layer An analyst asks where to find Bloomberg company identifiers and the associated figures ne...
Design and Debug a Point-in-Time Backtest Data Pipeline
Design and Debug a Point-in-Time Backtest Data Pipeline You own the data pipeline that feeds a quantitative backtest. The inputs include security iden...
Build a One-Pass Data Cleaning Pipeline
This question evaluates a candidate's competence in large-scale data engineering and system design, covering memory-bounded streaming IO, explainable ...
Design a Data Pipeline for Messy Pod Alerts and Bad Pod Detection
Design a data system that turns messy pod alert history into structured signals and detects bad pods by comparing them to sibling replicas. `hint Hint...
Design a Conversation Log Ingestion Pipeline
This question evaluates a data engineer's competency in designing robust daily ingestion and ETL pipelines for conversation logs, covering schema and ...
Build a Transaction CSV Cleaning Pipeline
This question evaluates skills in data engineering and software engineering fundamentals, focusing on designing deterministic, auditable batch ETL/cle...
Design Video Call Analytics Tables
You are building analytics tables for Discord video calls. Video-call activity is recorded from both client-side and server-side logs. Design a data m...
Answer SQL And Data Warehouse Fundamentals For A Data Engineering Interview
Practice data engineering fundamentals across SQL set operations, anti-joins, top-N window queries, and warehouse modeling. The prompt covers UNION ve...
Choose Between Batch and Streaming for a Data Pipeline
Prompt The interview report mentioned detailed questions about the candidate's batch- and stream-processing experience, but it did not preserve an exa...
Design Data Quality and Observability Pipeline
Design a production data orchestration, data quality, and observability framework for batch and streaming data pipelines. Your design should address: ...
Design a clickstream ingestion and aggregation pipeline for billions of events per day
Design a clickstream ingestion and aggregation pipeline for billions of events per day You are designing the data platform for a large consumer stream...
Use AI Responsibly During SQL Pair Programming
Prompt The reported pair-programming round included several SQL exercises and explicitly evaluated both collaboration and the candidate's use of AI. T...
Design a GPU Telemetry Collection and Analytics Platform
Design a platform that collects GPU telemetry from a large compute environment and exposes both high-level trend analytics and low-level drilldowns. T...
Data Pipeline Reliability, Backfills, and Spark Optimization
You are interviewing for a senior data engineering role on an analytics and observability team. The interviewer asks a sequence of practical questions...
Explain Spark Execution and Optimization
You are interviewing for a Data Engineer role. In a 30-minute discussion on production data engineering, the interviewer probes how well you understan...
Design a Telemetry Platform Ingesting Two Gigabytes per Second
Design a robotics telemetry platform handling two gigabytes of raw events per second. Reason through capacity, edge buffering, durable ingestion, repl...
Deep-dive XGBoost handling and overfitting
Technical / ML Deep Dive You used gradient-boosted decision trees (e.g., XGBoost/LightGBM) for a credit risk or response prediction problem. Answer th...
Design teleoperations data models and pipelines
You work on a fully autonomous robotaxi service. Passengers can request rides, get picked up, and get dropped off. During trips, the robotaxis are con...