My first data engineering job interview
A few weeks ago, I attended my first data engineering interview and I want to share my experience. Arguably, I have not seen many data engineering job advertisements compared to software engineering roles. I am a native of West Africa and since 2018 I have taken several courses in data science hoping to get employment either as a junior data engineer or a junior machine learning engineer but I am aware of the very limited job opportunities in this area.
Perhaps fortunate for me, I work with a German company that offers data science and software engineering services for clients in Germany as a data engineer. I landed this job after completing a data science course organized by the organization. About 8 months into this role, a friend working in one of the banks told me of management wanting to hire data engineers and I decided to apply.
The interview
I was tensed since the interviewers did not set a friendly environment for the interview from the onset (unlike me when I’m conducting interviews). I am not sure if the time of the interview did not favor the interviewers as they seemed to be in a hurry to end the interview or perhaps they had gotten their ideal candidate and did not want to spend time getting to know me better.
Interview questions
Below is a little analysis of the interview questions and the various categories based on my own clustering. In the appendix, I share some of the questions asked.
Conclusion
Primarily, the outcome of the interview did not matter to me as much as the experience. I do not think I did incredibly well but I learned a few things that off course will make me stronger in my next interview.
This is another interesting article from Nagaraj where he articulates his data engineering interview.
Appendix: Interview questions
- Wow us
- What extraordinary things have you done in any recent project?
- What programming languages do you know?
- What is the difference between ETL and Pipeline?
- Do you have any experience in Machine Learning?
- Have you worked as a data scientist before?
- What is the difference between data lake and data warehouse?
- If you have an idea which you share with your direct manager and he doesn’t give an ear to your idea, what would you do?
- If you have to share a report with management using Power BI, what program will you integrate?
- What is your proficiency level in Power BI and SharePoint?
