Technical Foundation and Self Assessment Questions

Covers baseline technical knowledge and the candidate's ability to honestly assess and communicate their technical strengths and weaknesses. Topics include fundamental infrastructure and networking concepts, operating system and protocol basics, core development and platform concepts relevant to the role, and the candidate's candid self evaluation of their depth in specific technologies. Interviewers use this to calibrate how technical the candidate is expected to be, identify areas for growth, and ensure alignment of expectations between product and engineering for collaboration.

MediumTechnical

68 practiced

Given a transactions table (transaction_id, user_id, amount, updated_at) that may contain duplicate transaction_id rows with different updated_at timestamps, write a Postgres-compatible SQL pattern to identify and remove older duplicates while keeping the most recent row per transaction_id. Provide both SELECT and DELETE patterns.

MediumBehavioral

49 practiced

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a stakeholder about the definition of an important metric. What was the metric, why did you disagree, how did you present evidence, what compromise or decision was reached, and what did you document to prevent future ambiguity? Use the STAR format.

MediumTechnical

42 practiced

Compare ETL and ELT architectures for loading data into a cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake. For each approach list pros, cons, cost implications, and which you'd recommend for heavy transformations vs exploratory/ad-hoc analytics.

MediumTechnical

44 practiced

Using Python and pandas, write a snippet that reads transactions.csv with columns (transaction_id, product_category, occurred_at, revenue) and outputs a DataFrame pivot with index = continuous date range (occurred_at), columns = product_category, and values = daily revenue sums, filling missing category/date combinations with 0.

HardTechnical

38 practiced

For BI datasets containing PII, outline a comprehensive encryption and masking strategy covering data in-transit, at-rest, column-level encryption, tokenization, and role-based access. Include key management and rotation policies and describe how analysts can run legitimate aggregated reports without exposing raw PII.

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