Data Engineering Interview Questions and Answers

All Data Engineering questions

Data Engineering interview questions
#	Question	Difficulty	Type
1	ETL vs ELT: what factors decide the choice?	Easy	conceptual, architecture
2	Batch or streaming: how do you choose for a use case?	Medium	conceptual, architecture
3	Data lake vs warehouse vs lakehouse: when would you choose each?	Medium	conceptual, architecture
4	How do you backfill a pipeline safely?	Medium	scenario, architecture
5	How do you handle late-arriving data?	Medium	scenario, architecture
6	How do you handle PII in a data pipeline?	Medium	scenario, architecture
7	How do you handle schema changes from upstream sources in a pipeline?	Medium	scenario, architecture
8	How do you test a data pipeline?	Medium	conceptual, scenario
9	How would you choose a partitioning strategy for a large table?	Medium	architecture, optimization
10	How would you choose an orchestrator for data pipelines?	Medium	conceptual, architecture
11	How would you design an idempotent batch pipeline?	Medium	architecture, scenario
12	How would you design an incremental load for a large table?	Medium	architecture, scenario
13	How would you investigate a suddenly slower data pipeline?	Medium	debugging, scenario
14	How would you monitor pipeline freshness and data SLAs?	Medium	scenario, architecture
15	What are the most important data-quality checks in production?	Medium	conceptual, scenario
16	What does CI/CD look like for data pipelines?	Medium	conceptual, architecture
17	Exactly-once vs effectively-once: what can a pipeline really guarantee?	Hard	conceptual, architecture
18	How would you design a CDC pipeline?	Hard	architecture, scenario

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