Real Soft Data Engineer interview questions

Recruiter Screening (30 min) Behavioral questions (Leadership Principles). Overview of your experience with data pipelines, SQL, and AWS. Technical Phone Screen (45-60 min) SQL/Python Coding: Live coding on platforms like Codility. Data Modeling: Design a schema for a given use case. Example: "Design a fact table for an e-commerce order tracking system." On-Site/Virtual Loop (4-5 Rounds) Data Pipeline Design: Scalable ETL/ELT systems (e.g., "How would you process 1TB of clickstream data daily?"). Coding: Python/Scala for data transformations (Spark preferred). System Design: AWS services (Redshift, Glue, Kinesis) + trade-offs. Behavioral: STAR-method responses to Leadership Principles.