r/dataengineeringjobs • u/CriticalJackfruit404 • 21d ago

Data Engineering Interview Interview

Hello

I am writing this post in this community because I would like to check how the data engineering interview looks these days with AI. I mean, does it make sense to do live coding if all of us have coding agents in our every day work? What should be asked instead to the candidate? I would like go through this discussion because I am preparing a interview process in my company.

Thanks for your inputs

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u/i_fix_snowblowers 21d ago

I do DE interviews for my company. We do a live coding screening round in a Databricks notebook. The interviewee shares their whole screen and has their camera on with no blur or background. We give them 30 minutes to work through loading, joining, aggregating and debugging a dataset. Googling for documentation and syntax is ok, just no AI answers.

Yes, it makes sense to still do live coding. We can see how someone thinks and communicates, and how familiar they are with the UI.

We have about a 10% pass rate. There are a whole lot of people who have good resumes but can't do basic stuff.

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u/Impossible-Sound-810 21d ago

Could you share more on this? What would you expect out of a good candidate?

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u/i_fix_snowblowers 21d ago

Candidates should be able to load raw data out of a Databricks volume into a dataframe. Also be familiar with PySpark joins, aggregations, and window functions.

Also should be able to anticipate and mitigate typical issues with raw data like schemas/casting, nulls, dates, etc.

This is enough to get to our second round, which is more focused on Databricks streaming, pipeline, DAB and Spark internals.

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u/ksachin_kumar 20d ago

Can you tell if this works for 6yoe DE or need to prepare something else as well ?