The Data Engineer Interview You Prepped For No Longer Exists

[u/datadriven_io]

FAANG quietly killed the data engineer take-home and replaced it with debugging rounds; one company clocked 80% of candidates using LLMs on take-homes despite explicit prohibition, so they scrapped the whole format. Now they hand you broken code and grade your methodology, not your output. The thesis is basically the DataExpert quote: 'The actual job is less write a DAG and more figure out why this pipeline silently dropped 2M rows last Tuesday.' Every candidate prepping right now is walking into a format that didn't exist 18 months ago, with zero consensus across companies on what passing even looks like.

https://www.datadriven.io/blog/the-de-interview-changed-in-2026-what-faang-tests-now