Accenture

Global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security.

4 Rounds ~21 Days Medium

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The Interview Loop

Recruiter Screen (30 min)

Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.

Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)

Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.

Interview Question Bank

All Roles Backend Engineer 35 Cloud Engineer 35 Data Engineer 35 Data Scientist 35 DevOps Engineer 35 Frontend Engineer 35 Machine Learning Engineer 35 Product Manager 35 Software Engineer 35

All Topics PySpark / Big Data 6 SQL 5 Python 3 System Design 3 Data Modeling 3 Cloud Architecture 2 Cloud Data Warehousing 2 Orchestration 1

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you had to push back on a client's unrealistic technical requirement or deadline. How did you handle it?

#Communication #Stakeholder Management #Consulting

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time your ETL pipeline failed in production during off-hours. What was your troubleshooting process?

#Incident Management #Troubleshooting #Reliability

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you optimized an existing data pipeline and significantly reduced cloud compute costs.

#Performance Tuning #Cloud Costs #FinOps

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Explain a complex data engineering concept (like MapReduce or Data Lakehouse) to a non-technical business stakeholder.

#Stakeholder Management #Consulting #Communication

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • easy

Describe a situation where you had to learn a new cloud technology or tool very quickly to deliver a project for a client.

#Continuous Learning #Consulting #Agile

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Explain the difference between ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), and DENSE_RANK() in SQL. Can you write a query to find the 3rd highest salary in each department using one of these?

#Window Functions #Data Aggregation #SQL Queries

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a Python function to flatten a deeply nested JSON object or dictionary into a single-level dictionary with concatenated keys.

#Python #Data Structures #Recursion #JSON

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • easy

Write a SQL query to find all employees who earn more than their direct managers.

#Self Joins #SQL Queries

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

You have a large CSV file (50GB) that cannot fit into memory. Write a Python script (without using Pandas/Spark) to read the file, count the occurrences of a specific value in a column, and output the result.

#Python #Memory Management #File I/O

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a PySpark script to read a parquet file, drop duplicate rows based on 'user_id' keeping the row with the most recent 'update_timestamp', and write back to a Delta table.

#PySpark #Window Functions #Delta Lake

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a SQL query to calculate the rolling 7-day average of sales for each product.

#Window Functions #Time Series #SQL Queries

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • easy

Given an array of integers, write a Python function to return the indices of the two numbers that add up to a specific target. (Two Sum)

#Python #Arrays #Hash Maps

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a SQL query to delete duplicate rows from a table without using a temporary table, keeping only the row with the lowest ID.

#Data Cleansing #SQL Queries

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a Python script to merge two dictionaries. If there are overlapping keys, sum their values.

#Python #Dictionaries #Data Manipulation

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a SQL query to pivot rows into columns. For example, turning a table of 'Employee, Month, Salary' into 'Employee, Jan_Salary, Feb_Salary, etc.'

#Data Transformation #SQL Queries #Pivot

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a batch ETL pipeline to migrate 10TB of historical data from an on-premise Oracle database to Snowflake on Azure. What tools would you use and how would you orchestrate it?

#Azure Data Factory #Snowflake #ETL #Data Migration

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a real-time streaming pipeline for an e-commerce client to process clickstream data and detect fraudulent transactions within seconds.

#Kafka #Spark Streaming #Real-time Processing #Fraud Detection

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • medium

How do you ensure data quality and handle bad records in your ETL pipelines?

#Data Governance #ETL #Error Handling

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • medium

Design a data reconciliation framework to verify that all data from a source SQL Server made it accurately to the target Snowflake data warehouse.

#Data Reconciliation #Data Quality #ETL

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • hard

How would you design a Data Lake architecture for a healthcare client ensuring strict PII and HIPAA compliance?

#Data Security #Healthcare #Data Lake #Compliance

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • medium

How do you handle late-arriving data in a daily batch ETL pipeline?

#Data Engineering #Batch Processing #Data Quality

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • hard

How do you handle data skewness in PySpark when joining a very large fact table with a dimension table?

#PySpark #Performance Tuning #Data Skewness #Salting

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

What is the difference between REPARTITION and COALESCE in PySpark? When would you use one over the other?

#PySpark #Data Partitioning #Performance Optimization

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD). How would you implement an SCD Type 2 in a data warehouse using SQL or PySpark?

#Data Warehousing #SCD #Dimensional Modeling

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • hard

How does the Catalyst Optimizer work in Spark? Explain the logical and physical plan generation.

#Spark Internals #Catalyst Optimizer #Query Execution

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Describe the architecture of Snowflake. What are virtual warehouses and micro-partitions?

#Snowflake #Cloud Architecture #Storage and Compute

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

In Azure Data Factory, how do you pass parameters dynamically between a pipeline and a dataset?

#Azure Data Factory #Parameterization #CI/CD

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

What is the 'small files problem' in Hadoop/Spark, and how do you resolve it?

#HDFS #Spark #Performance Tuning #File Formats

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

Explain the difference between a Star Schema and a Snowflake Schema. Which one performs better in a modern columnar cloud data warehouse?

#Data Warehousing #Star Schema #Snowflake Schema

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

What are ACID transactions, and how does Delta Lake implement them on top of cloud object storage like S3 or ADLS?

#Delta Lake #ACID #Databricks

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain how Airflow architecture works. What are DAGs, Operators, and XComs?

#Apache Airflow #Data Orchestration #DAGs

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

How do Kafka consumer groups work? What happens if you have more consumers in a group than partitions in a topic?

#Apache Kafka #Streaming #Distributed Systems

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

What is a Factless Fact Table? Give a real-world business scenario where you would use one.

#Data Warehousing #Dimensional Modeling

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

What is the difference between an RDD, a DataFrame, and a Dataset in Spark?

#Spark #Data Structures

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Compare AWS Glue and Amazon EMR. When would you choose one over the other for an ETL workload?

#AWS #ETL #Big Data

Practice

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