got pinged by a recruiter, had an initial call, and now have a technical screen scheduled. looking for anyone who's been through a data engineering or data platform interview here recently.
specifically curious: is it SQL-heavy or more python/spark? did they ask anything distributed-systems-flavored or is it mostly ETL design and pipeline architecture? any behavioral traps I should watch for?
drop your data point below. even if it was a year ago and the role was slightly different, still useful.
4 replies
ds_dmitri
not DE specifically but i did a data analyst panel at state street last year. heavy SQL. we're talking multi-table joins, window functions, aggregation with filters. python came up but not deeply. the behavioral side asked a lot about data quality and what you do when the numbers don't add up.
market_realist
did a data platform interview there about 8 months ago. spark came up in the design round but wasn't the main event. they cared more about lineage and auditability than raw processing performance. which makes sense, it's a bank. everything needs to be traceable.
de_derek
lineage and auditability, got it. that's the same muscle i use for financial data at my current place so that's reassuring. thanks.
backend_bekah
for behaviorals specifically: they asked me (software track) about times I caught errors before they caused downstream problems. i'd guess data eng gets the same flavor. compliance-and-risk lens on everything.