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Data Engineer Interview Questions

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Data Engineer Interview Questions

Data engineers are IT professionals who are needed in almost every industry. Data engineers monitor data trends to determine best next steps for companies. A critical part of a data engineer job is to process raw data into usable data by creating data pipelines and building data systems.

Top Data Engineer Interview Questions & How To Answer

Question 1

Question #1: Can you describe in detail your level of expertise with programming languages?

How to answer
How to answer: Before the interview, review your resume and/or portfolio and make a list of the programs you are most proficient with. If you find that you are lacking the expertise in a program that the company predominately uses, describe yourself as a highly motivated self-starter who will work tirelessly to learn the program(s).
Question 2

Question #2: Explain data engineering in your own words.

How to answer
How to answer: Highlight your role in relation to the larger organization and other roles like data scientists to clearly define your contribution to the overall system of business. Clarify the difference between a database-centric engineer and a pipeline-centric engineer.
Question 3

Question #3: Can you describe your experience working with Apache Hadoop and cloud data management environments?

How to answer
How to answer: Research the company's software, data cloud products, and use of Apache Hadoop to be prepared for this inquiry. Data Engineers must be fluent in programming languages and data management systems used throughout the industry such as Apache Hadoop.

20,268 data engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Data Format: All data can be downloaded from a public Google Cloud Storage bucket with the following commands using the gsutil tool: mkdir pachama_interview_data/ gsutil -m cp -R gs://pachama-interview-data/* pachama_interview_data/ The resulting folder structure should look like: pachama_interview_data/ rasters/ 299_383_10.tif Data Engineer Take-home Test 2 299_384_10.tif coordinates.geojson Raster Files: Rasters are stored in GeoTIFF format. Each file is named according to its spherical mercator XYZ tile name. There are 2 raster files in the GCS bucket under the rasters directory. The rasters are derived from Landsat imagery. The spatial resolution of the raster data is 30 meters. We stacked yearly images from 1984 to 2020, where each year's image contains 6 bands of data (a raster band is analogous to an image channel). The result is (37 years * 6 bands per year) = 222 total bands per raster file. Each raster has dimensions of 984x1305 pixels. The resulting numpy array for the file has the shape [222, 984, 1305] . The coordinate reference system (CRS) for the rasters is WGS84. Coordinates The coordinate data is stored as a shapely MultiPoint geometry in a GeoJSON file. Each coordinate represents a (longitude, latitude) pair . You may assume that each coordinate listed exists in one of the raster files. The GeoJSON file is located at the root level of the bucket with the name coordinates.geojson . Task: The goal of the assignment is to efficiently index into the provided rasters and extract "chips". A chip is defined as a square of pixels centered around a coordinate for a given year. Ideas for extensions: Create a completely vectorized version of this approach with numpy. Use a machine learning library such as PyTorch or TensorFlow to create a dataloader for this dataset, where a labeled example is a tuple consisting of a chip and the shapely geometry for its center coordinate. Use mmap and/or caching to extract chips from a data stream Questions: Informally describe the runtime and memory complexities of your solution as a function of: The number of raster files The number of coordinates How would an ideal implementation change if you had to process 100x the number of rasters and/or coordinates?
avatar

Data Engineer

Interviewed at Pachama

4.7★
Sep 7, 2022

Data Format: All data can be downloaded from a public Google Cloud Storage bucket with the following commands using the gsutil tool: mkdir pachama_interview_data/ gsutil -m cp -R gs://pachama-interview-data/* pachama_interview_data/ The resulting folder structure should look like: pachama_interview_data/ rasters/ 299_383_10.tif Data Engineer Take-home Test 2 299_384_10.tif coordinates.geojson Raster Files: Rasters are stored in GeoTIFF format. Each file is named according to its spherical mercator XYZ tile name. There are 2 raster files in the GCS bucket under the rasters directory. The rasters are derived from Landsat imagery. The spatial resolution of the raster data is 30 meters. We stacked yearly images from 1984 to 2020, where each year's image contains 6 bands of data (a raster band is analogous to an image channel). The result is (37 years * 6 bands per year) = 222 total bands per raster file. Each raster has dimensions of 984x1305 pixels. The resulting numpy array for the file has the shape [222, 984, 1305] . The coordinate reference system (CRS) for the rasters is WGS84. Coordinates The coordinate data is stored as a shapely MultiPoint geometry in a GeoJSON file. Each coordinate represents a (longitude, latitude) pair . You may assume that each coordinate listed exists in one of the raster files. The GeoJSON file is located at the root level of the bucket with the name coordinates.geojson . Task: The goal of the assignment is to efficiently index into the provided rasters and extract "chips". A chip is defined as a square of pixels centered around a coordinate for a given year. Ideas for extensions: Create a completely vectorized version of this approach with numpy. Use a machine learning library such as PyTorch or TensorFlow to create a dataloader for this dataset, where a labeled example is a tuple consisting of a chip and the shapely geometry for its center coordinate. Use mmap and/or caching to extract chips from a data stream Questions: Informally describe the runtime and memory complexities of your solution as a function of: The number of raster files The number of coordinates How would an ideal implementation change if you had to process 100x the number of rasters and/or coordinates?

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