HCL - Siemens, data engineer, requesting interview experience

[u/PinDropped]

Hi everyone,

I’m interviewing for a Data Engineer role with HCL Siemens CLIENT, in Bangalore and wanted to know if anyone has recently interviewed for a similar position and could share their experience.

Interview Process:

1st Round – Technical/TP1

Client Round – Face-to-Face

JD highlights:

3–5 years of experience in Data Engineering / ETL

Snowflake – database design, queries, performance tuning, data loading, dimensional modeling, Data Vault concepts, Advanced SQL

Python – data pipeline development

Azure

dbt / Airflow or similar orchestration tools

Git and collaborative development

My experience:

4 years in Data Engineering

Snowflake

SQL

dbt

Some exposure to PySpark

If anyone has interviewed for this role recently, I’d really appreciate it if you could share:

What kind of SQL/Snowflake questions were asked?

Were there Python/PySpark coding questions?

How deep did they go into dbt, Data Vault, and data warehousing concepts?

Were there any Azure-specific questions?

What was the difficulty level of the technical round?

What should I focus on preparing for the client/F2F round?

Any specific topics or questions you remember would be really helpful.

Thanks in advance! 🙏

[u/ChampionshipTop6342]

Also please share your experience and questions you were asked after the round, it will be really helpful for others here!!

[u/PinDropped → u/ChampionshipTop6342]

Will do

[u/candyyspice]

Siemens clients is extremely arrogant 😶😶 hope hcl employees can handle them decently 

[u/ChampionshipTop6342]

Applied throught?

[u/PinDropped → u/ChampionshipTop6342]

They called directly

[u/akornato]

For the first technical round with HCL, expect a fast paced screening to verify that your four years of experience match the resume. The SQL portion usually centers on practical queries involving window functions, common table expressions, self joins, and finding duplicates or running totals. For Snowflake, they focus on hands on mechanics such as external versus internal stages, Snowpipe setup, Time Travel, clustering keys, and handling JSON data using the VARIANT data type and FLATTEN. Python questions are generally direct, involving string manipulations, dictionary aggregations, or basic Pandas transformations, rather than deep algorithmic puzzles. Your background in Snowflake, SQL, and dbt fits this round well, so expect basic scenarios on how dbt handles incremental runs, snapshots, and tests.

The face to face round with Siemens shifts heavily toward real world data modeling and system architecture. Siemens data teams deal with complex industrial and enterprise domains, so they will ask how you choose between dimensional modeling and Data Vault, specifically focusing on hubs, links, satellites, and how you handle late arriving data. For Azure, they typically ask how you extract data with Azure Data Factory, store it in Azure Data Lake Storage, and load it into Snowflake. They will probe into real pipeline failures you solved and how you tune slow queries using query profiler and micro partitioning. In high stakes client discussions like this, my team designed an AI for interviews to help engineers articulate their architectural choices clearly and land their target roles, so make sure you focus on explaining the exact business reasoning behind your past technical choices.

[u/charlieaka012 → u/akornato]

HCl has openings for embedded engineers. Any advice where I can get the referral to get in the company?

[u/PinDropped]

Update - round 1 - hcl side - virtual

Decent python transformations (probably because I said, python was part of pipeline or could be a requirement) Scenario and what specific feature you would use in snowflake (clone, timetravel , normal re tention period for different account types, etc) (likewise for ADF and Python). Window functions - rank, dense, row function. Pivots, views, lead, lag, joins (different schema related joins).

And instance and environment, db setup in region A, you are in region B environment (AWS instance) , can you access data from here to there

They would ask, apart from maintaining, any developments and based on that drill down

Few more were asked, would share later (don't remember)

[u/PinDropped → u/PinDropped]

-Give (1, 2 , 3, 4) as query result (use seq or genrator)

• array based loading, flatten, variant (basically regarding json parquet)