Just wrapped up the ServiceNow data engineer interview loop last month and wanted to document this while it's fresh. Applied for a senior DE role on the Now Platform data infrastructure team out of San Diego (remote-eligible).
The process was five rounds total: recruiter screen, a 45-min SQL/coding screen, a pipeline design round, a behavioral round, and then a final team fit call.
SQL and coding screen
This was not LeetCode. It was actual, plausible SQL. Window functions, CTEs, a query about finding duplicate records in an event stream, one question about optimizing a slow query (they gave you an EXPLAIN plan to analyze). If you're a data engineer who hasn't touched SQL in a while because you've been living in Spark, spend a week here. They care.
One coding question in Python: write a function to flatten a nested JSON structure. Not hard, but they watched how you handled edge cases (None values, deeply nested keys).
Pipeline design round
This was the most interesting part. Prompt was something like: design a pipeline to ingest ServiceNow platform telemetry events (think IT operations data: incidents, changes, CMDB updates) and make them queryable by downstream analysts within 15 minutes of ingestion. They wanted me to talk through tooling choices, latency tradeoffs, failure modes, schema evolution.
I went with a Kafka-based ingestion layer feeding into Snowflake via dbt transformations, with a separate hot path to a Redis cache for the most recent 1 hour of data. They pushed back on the Redis layer and wanted me to defend it. That's fine, the defense is the point.
Behavioral round
Standard STAR stuff. Tell me about a time a pipeline failed in production. Tell me about a disagreement with a stakeholder about data quality. One question specifically about cross-functional work with SREs. Prep these, they matter at ServiceNow.
Comp at offer (declined, took something else) Senior DE, San Diego location: base was $185k, total cash around $195k with bonus. RSUs I wasn't shown until late in the process which was annoying. Market rate for a senior DE in 2026 in that geo felt right though, not exceptional.
Overall a well-run loop. The technical bar felt real, not performative.