Initial Screening (HR / Recruiter Round) This is a quick discussion to understand your background, experience, and expectations. They typically ask about: Your current role and projects Tech stack (like PySpark, SQL, AWS, etc.) Notice period and salary expectations 2. Technical Round 1 (SQL + Basics) This round mainly checks your fundamentals. You can expect: SQL problems (joins, window functions, aggregations) Data cleaning or transformation questions Basic Python or PySpark questions Example: Find nth highest salary Remove duplicates Identify consecutive records 3. Technical Round 2 (Data Engineering Concepts) This is more in-depth and practical. Topics usually include: Data pipeline design ETL/ELT concepts Batch vs streaming Partitioning, bucketing Data lakes vs data warehouses They may ask: How you designed a pipeline using Spark/Airflow Handling late-arriving data Performance optimization techniques 4. System Design Round (Important for 3+ yrs experience) Here they test how you think and design systems. Typical questions: Design a data pipeline for a telecom or e-commerce system Handle large-scale data ingestion (Kafka → S3 → Redshift) Data quality and monitoring Focus areas: Scalability Fault tolerance Cost optimization 5. Managerial / Behavioral Round This round checks how you work in a team. Common questions: Challenges you faced in a project How you handled failures in pipelines Working with stakeholders