Went through the JPMC data engineer interview loop in March 2026 for a role on the commercial banking data platform team in NYC. Sharing details because I found almost nothing useful online before going in.
The process was five rounds total. Phone screen with a recruiter (comp expectations, timeline, standard stuff). Then a technical screen with a senior DE on the team. Then three onsite rounds back to back over two days, which they did virtually.
Technical screen was 60 minutes. Half SQL, half "walk me through a pipeline you built and what broke." The SQL was legitimately hard. Window functions, CTEs, a question that involved ranking with ties. Not medium LeetCode, this was actual query optimization thinking. I had to explain why I'd choose a certain join order and what the query planner would do.
Onsite round 1: system design for data. They gave me a scenario: design the ingestion layer for real-time transaction data feeding a fraud detection model. I talked through Kafka, the partitioning strategy, schema registry, how you handle late-arriving data. They pushed back hard on my retry logic. Be ready to defend your choices.
Onsite round 2: more SQL and Python. SQL again was window functions. Python was pandas, then they pivoted to "how would you do this in PySpark" for one of the transformations. I hadn't used Spark heavily in my current job and it showed a bit.
Onsite round 3: behavioral. Standard JPMC behavioral format. Three STAR-method questions. "Tell me about a time you caught a data quality issue in production." "Describe a time you had to influence a stakeholder without authority." Classic stuff but they want specifics.
A few things that mattered more than I expected: understanding data lineage, knowing the difference between batch and streaming architectures beyond the surface level, and being able to talk about observability on your pipelines (not just whether they run, but how you know the data is right).
Total timeline from application to offer was about 6 weeks. Offer came in at a reasonable senior DE band for NYC though I'll note JPMC is not trying to match pure tech company comp. If you need to know exact numbers, check the comp thread on this company page.