just finished (and accepted) a PwC data engineer offer so here's the debrief. this was for their Technology Consulting practice, specifically a team doing data platform work for financial services clients. sharing because there wasn't much out there specifically on the DE interview, most posts conflate it with the DS role.
screening: standard call, 25 minutes. they wanted to know my pipeline experience (Airflow, dbt, Spark, that kind of thing) and my comfort with client-facing delivery. the word 'client' comes up a lot at PwC. get comfortable with it.
technical round 1: SQL and data modeling (75 min with a shared coding environment) this was the hardest round. two problems: first was a pure SQL problem. given a table of transactions with timestamps, compute rolling 7-day revenue per customer and flag customers where that metric dropped more than 20% week over week. window functions, CTEs, date math. not a "find duplicates" beginner problem. second was a data modeling question. they gave me a vague business description (insurance company tracking claims, adjusters, and outcomes) and asked me to design a dimensional model. star schema, slowly changing dimensions, grain definition. they pushed on every choice I made.
technical round 2: pipeline design + architecture (60 min) almost entirely conceptual. they described a scenario where a client has 14 source systems dumping flat files in different formats onto an SFTP server and they need a consolidated data warehouse refreshed daily. walk them through how you'd build it.
they wanted to hear about: ingestion layer (how you handle bad files, schema drift), transformation layer (dbt vs. stored procs and why), orchestration (Airflow scheduling, retry logic, alerting), and data quality checks. no coding here, just architecture discussion. they also asked how you'd handle a source going silent: do you fail the pipeline, do you load partial data, what do you tell the client.
behavioral round: standard STAR. biggest focus was on situations where a technical solution had to be communicated to non-technical stakeholders. PwC DE roles are consulting roles, you're presenting to clients.
partner call: 30 minutes, felt more like a coffee chat. they were checking if I'd be a good client-facing presence.
comp for the offer (senior associate level, NYC, 2026): base in the low 110s, which is below pure-tech-company DE comp but the benefits package and brand recognition for PE/banking clients is the trade-off people make.
tips: get comfortable with dbt specifically, it came up in both rounds. Databricks is in heavy use on their platform projects. cloud was AWS for this team.