Question 1

Walk me through the design of a recent pipeline you owned, from ingestion to consumption.

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Question 2

How do you approach data quality, lineage, and freshness on the pipelines you've built?

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Question 3

Tell me about a time the data was wrong in production. How did you find out, and how did you fix it?

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Question 4

When would you reach for streaming over batch?

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Data Engineer interview questions

Questions to ask a data engineer