Portfolio Overview & Project Selection Questions
Be ready to describe your strongest 2-3 projects concisely. For each, explain the problem you solved, your design approach, tools used, and outcomes or learnings. Even if your projects are academic or hypothetical, focus on your thinking process and how you would measure success.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Pick one project from your portfolio and explain how you measured its success. Include quantitative metrics (SLIs/SLOs), business KPIs, data quality metrics, and how you instrumented monitoring and alerting. If the project never reached production, describe how you would define and simulate those metrics for evaluation.
MediumBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell the story of a schema change you encountered in production (added/removed columns, type changes, renamed fields). Explain how you detected the change, strategies you used for backward/forward compatibility, migration steps, testing plan, and rollback plan.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
For a project, explain how you collaborated with data scientists and product managers: how you gathered requirements, defined data contracts or SLAs, handled feature requests, and ensured reproducibility and discoverability of datasets for experiments. Provide an example of a conflict and how you resolved it.
EasyBehavioral
0 practiced
Prepare a 60-second elevator pitch for your top 2-3 data engineering projects. For each project, describe the problem you solved, your specific role, core architecture or design approach, key tools used (e.g., Spark, Airflow, Kafka, Snowflake), one measurable outcome, and a one-line takeaway. Tailor the pitch to a hiring manager with limited time and include what you would prioritize discussing if asked to expand.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a data pipeline to meet cross-region data sovereignty requirements (e.g., some user data must remain in country A while analytics runs in region B). Outline replication, partitioning, encryption, routing, failover, and how you would reconcile cross-region analytics while preserving compliance.
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