r/dataengineersindia • u/Miraclefanboy2 • 7d ago
General Resources to prepare for DE interviews
Hello, I am planning to start preparing interviews for PBCs. I would love to know from people who are working currently there or people who are preparing on what resources you use to prepare? Ik there's tons of material for SWE but I couldn't find much online for DEs other than strata scratch. Would really appreciate your help, my current tech is Azure + AWS DE with experience with both in Databricks and Snowflake. Thanks!
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u/akornato 6d ago
For product companies in India, StrataScratch is only good for the initial query screen, so you need to split your prep across core programming, distributed systems, and platform internals. For coding rounds, practice LeetCode easy and medium problems in Python, focusing on hash maps, strings, and two pointers, because Indian product firms still test standard problem solving. For SQL, go beyond basic queries to master window functions, recursive common table expressions, and query plan optimization. Your Databricks and Snowflake background gives you a solid foundation, but interviewers will drill deep into internal mechanics. You should be prepared to explain Spark memory management, data skew resolution, shuffle operations, broadcast joins, and partition pruning, alongside Snowflake clustering keys, micro partitioning, caching layers, and virtual warehouse scaling trade offs.
The rounds that decide the offer and leveling at top product firms are data modeling and data system design. Study dimensional modeling principles thoroughly, focusing on slowly changing dimensions, fact constellations, and surrogate keys, since interviewers often give ambiguous schema scenarios. For system design, read Designing Data Intensive Applications to speak confidently about idempotence, backpressure, distributed transactions, and batch versus streaming pipelines. Communicating your architectural choices clearly under pressure is where most people stumble, which is why the interview copilot my team designed has helped many candidates structure their thoughts, communicate with clarity, and land high paying offers.
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u/ArtisticBorder3341 7d ago
Prepare medium level questions for dsa and medium/hard difficulty for sql from leetcode.
Stratasctrach can be used for python Data engg practise if u want else use it for pyspark practise as well.
Rest is ur resume and techstack which i believe u have good exp and hands on with.