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Cracking the Data Engineering Interview — Part 1: Structure
The goal of this blog post is to offer some general information about the data engineering interview process and offer some useful tips that might help a newbie land their first data engineering job.
As a senior data engineer that has transitioned from a completely non-IT-related field into data engineering and job hopped from one company to another at least once a year for the past 5 years. I have gone through my fair number of interviews (an approximate range of 100 interviews). I even went through the process of interviewing for 50 companies in a 3-month period to land my first job, then interviewed with over 15 companies in a month to land a job as a senior data engineer. I can tell you that it is not an easy and enjoyable process. It can be mentally draining and crushing.
Currently, I have had the opportunity to play the role of the interviewer and interviewed a couple of candidates in my last few job roles for data engineering positions. I have also mentored a few friends that began their data engineering journey recently so that they could land their first data engineering roles.
Data Engineering Interview format
Normally, data engineering interviews consist of at least two rounds of interviews with different interviewers that are part of…