Data Engineer Coding & Algorithms Interview Questions

Data engineers get algorithm questions, but not quite the ones a software engineer gets, and these 60 reports mark where they separate. Meta is the dominant source at 12, with Bytedance, Google, Point72 and Stripe at 3 each and Amazon, Nextdoor and Disney behind. Expect Python written the way a pipeline author writes it: counting keys in a dictionary and returning the most frequent one without reaching for max(), reconstructing which letters are missing from a scrambled string, filling in classes inside an abstract framework somebody else designed, and sequence problems with a constraint attached, such as maximising watch time when two adjacent items cannot both be picked. Several reports mix the disciplines outright, asking for an election report alongside a banking pipeline, or for SQL that finds a user's first share and their closest collaborator. Placement is the biggest departure from a software engineering loop: 39 of the 60 were asked in a technical screen and only 10 onsite, so this reads as a phone-stage filter rather than something you revisit all day. 42 open in a runnable console, 33 are medium against 14 hard, and 78% of the page is free.