Train Your Brain: Data Engineer Interview Questions You’ll Get Asked

In our modern business community, a coding background elevates you above your peers and sets you on the road toward a rewarding career. Folks who attend coding bootcamp or pick up programming languages such as Scala have the tools needed to land great gigs and make serious cash. But what is Scala, and how does learning it prepare you to start swimming in dollar bills, Scrooge McDuck-style? Your time is precious, and you want to use it picking up only the most useful and essential skills.

0When you spend any time in today’s business world, you’re going to hear folks throw the word “data” around like it’s a hacky sack. That’s because data delivery and interpretation drives modern companies and determines everything from the products they sell to the clientele they need to reach; the engineers who manage it and ensure it gets to the data scientists are in high demand at Amazon, Facebook, and other enterprise-level companies. To land the plum gigs, you’ll need to be ready to answer data engineer interview questions of many difficulties and flavors.

Our guide is here to make the journey a bit easier. In this article, we give you some of the Facebook and Amazon data engineer interview questions you’re likely to run across in your next job interview. Hiring managers need to know if the folks they hire are cut out for the work, and we know the sorts of questions they use to make that determination. You’ll be ready to ace your next interview with our help.

Let’s Talk About Design Schemas

You’re going to get some tough questions at your first and, if they like you, second interviews for data engineer gigs. These questions help to weed out posers and allow the hiring managers to focus on qualified candidates. You’ll get basic knowledge questions right out of the gate to accomplish this, and you’d better be ready to come right back with an answer. Data engineering hopefuls should have design schemas ready to go—you’re almost certain to get Amazon and Facebook data engineer interview questions on the subject.

In data modeling, you can use one of two types of schema: star and snowflake. The star schema divides into the dimension table and the fact table. Foreign keys within the fact table refer to primary keys in the dimension table. Meanwhile, the snowflake schema produces multiple levels of normalization, which resembles a snowflake. Both schemas are in use and are effective tools for the data engineer. 

What Do You Need to Become a Data Engineer?

Your data engineer interview is going to be a mix of whiteboard questions and questions that tease out your background and expertise. Don’t be surprised to run across a few questions that require broad knowledge and show off a solid foundation. To that end, you’re likely to get a variant of the question, “Describe the skills you need to become a data engineer.” Having a ready reply is crucial if you want to win the gig.

While there are all sorts of replies you can make to this question and still be accurate, you’ll want to include a few fundamentals. You need a solid math background, of course—probability and linear algebra are essential here. A few statistics courses such as trend analysis and regression are also a must. You’ll also need loads of language software experience and should be well versed in Python, SAS, Hive QL, and machine learning, for starters.

Why is Big Data Analysis So Crucial?

In business today, the concept of big data has become ever more important. As a data engineer, the rise of big data has meant the rise of your discipline, and you should be ready to explain why it happened. A solid explanation of big data and why businesses rely upon it will make a strong impression on your hiring manager and put you in a good light for the remainder of the interview. Take the time to prepare a response that will dazzle them.

Put simply, big data is the analysis of all of us. Big data examines large statistical sets of business or human behavior and pulls trends and facts from them that might not be evident in more up-close analyses. Big data-type analytics uses predictive analysis to create customized recommendations for companies. This, in turn, allows businesses to create products designed to exploit empty niches and fill client’s needs more effectively. Companies that have a handle on big data can see revenue increases of up to 20 percent. 

What are the Types of Hadoop Configurations?

If you work as a data engineer, you’re going to work with Hadoop. Businesses use Hadoop as a means of distributed processing and storage of big data; it’s an open-source framework that works wonderfully to create as many concurrent tasks as you can dream of creating. You’ll get all kinds of Hadoop-based questions in your interview, including questions that relate to configurations. Prepare a quick answer, and impress your future boss.

Hadoop has four configuration files: Yarn-site.xml, Core-site.xml, Hdfs-site.xml, and Mapred-site.xml. Yarn-site.xml has a config file that establishes settings for NodeManager and ResourceManager. Meanwhile, Core-site.xml contains core config settings (big surprise, right?) for Hadoop elements like I/O settings. Use Hdfs-site.xml for HDFS daemon settings and to specify replication checking and default block permission. Finally, you would use Mapred-site.xml to list a framework name for MapReduce.

And there you go, beautiful people. Data engineering jobs are growing in number and importance, and you can get on board. We’ve created a guide to lay out the data engineer interview questions you’re most likely to run across in your job search. Before long, you’ll be prepared to take on any interview questions and come up smiling.

Our guide will show you all about this exciting and relatively new coding language. We let you in on all of the uses for Scala and explain why it can change your career for the better. You’ll get a rundown on how this programming language allows you to master big-data tasks and adjust the scope for large or small tasks. By the time you finish this article, you’ll be a Scala convert and will add it to your roster of must-learn languages.