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."
"The solution quality is insane. It covers approach, edge cases, time complexity, follow-ups. Nothing else comes close."
"Legit the only resource you need. TC went from 180k -> 350k. Just memorize the top 50 for your target company and you're golden."
"PracHub Premium for one month cost me the price of two coffees a week. It landed me a $280K+ starting offer."
"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."
Implement Election Report and Banking Pipeline
You are given two independent data engineering coding tasks. Task 1: SQL Election Exit Poll by State Report An election analytics team needs a report ...
Build a Least-Recently-Used Store
Implement an in-memory key-value store with least-recently-used eviction. The store is initialized with a positive integer capacity and supports two o...
Validate an IPv4 address string
Given a string s, determine whether it is a valid IPv4 address. A valid IPv4 address: - Has exactly 4 parts separated by dots (.): x1.x2.x3.x4 - Each ...
Explain Your Resume and Behavioral Examples
Behavioral & Leadership Technical Screen — Data Engineer Context You will be assessed on impact, decision-making under ambiguity, stakeholder manageme...
Design tables for event-driven metrics
Design a Relational Schema for Consumer-App Event Analytics Context and Assumptions You are designing the event store for a high-volume consumer app. ...
Design a scalable dimensional model
Design a Dimensional Model for Transactional Analytics (Concrete Example Included) You are building a star-schema in a cloud data warehouse for near r...
Compute User Login Streaks
This question evaluates SQL proficiency in processing event logs for time-series analysis, encompassing date arithmetic, deduplication of same-day eve...
Describe building and improving a dashboard
Describe a past project where you built a dashboard for business or product stakeholders. Explain the business goal, audience, metrics, data-quality w...
Describe a challenging project and your role
You are interviewing for a new-grad software role. Answer the following behavioral prompts (BQ) based on one of your internship or project experiences...
Define and validate product metrics
Define and validate product metrics End-to-End Analytics Design for a New Product Feature Context: You are the data engineer partnering with product, ...
Design a Warehouse for Key Metrics
Design a Warehouse Model for Marketplace Analytics You are designing a warehouse model for an e-commerce marketplace with buyers, sellers, orders, ord...
Write SQL for app metrics
You are given a simplified schema for a photo-sharing app: - users(user_id, user_name, joined_at) - photos(photo_id, user_id, created_at) - follows(fo...
Analyze private-account product metrics
Analyze private-account product metrics A social network is building (or refining) a private account feature: any user can set their account to privat...
Deliver a concise self-introduction
Deliver a concise self-introduction Behavioral Prompt: 1–2 Minute Self‑Introduction for a Data Engineer Technical Screen Context You are interviewing ...
Demonstrate ownership and conflict resolution
Demonstrate ownership and conflict resolution Behavioral: 0→1 Data Initiative, Prioritization, and Cross-Functional Leadership Context: Onsite intervi...
Differentiate pandas objects and SQL filters
Python (pandas) 1. What is the difference between a pandas Series and a pandas DataFrame? - Discuss structure (1D vs 2D), indexing, column labels, ...
Design a scalable URL shortener
Design a highly scalable URL shortening service, similar to Bitly or TinyURL. The service converts long URLs into short links and redirects short-code...
Solve four algorithmic library problems
Solve the following coding tasks: 1) Maximum Points from Different Categories: Given an array of items (category, points) and an integer k, choose exa...
Visualize Netflix metric trends
Visualize Netflix metric trends Visualizing a Streaming Metric for Netflix Prompt Choose one streaming metric (for example, Daily Active Viewers or Av...
Discuss conflicts, deadlines, and persuasion
Discuss conflicts, deadlines, and persuasion Behavioral and Leadership Prompts for a Data Engineer (Onsite) Context: You are interviewing for a Data E...