Twitter / X
Real-time social platform with petabyte-scale data and ML ranking systems.
4 Rounds
~14 Days
Hard
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
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain how you would optimize a PySpark job that is suffering from severe data skew due to a viral tweet from Elon Musk.
#Spark
#Data Skew
#Salting
#Broadcast Joins
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How does Kafka handle message ordering, and how would you ensure ordered processing of a single user's tweets across partitions?
#Kafka
#Partitioning
#Message Ordering
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Compare Apache Flink and Spark Streaming. Which would you choose for calculating real-time engagement metrics at X, and why?
#Flink
#Spark Streaming
#Micro-batching vs Native Streaming
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Explain the differences between Parquet and Avro file formats. When would you use each in our data ecosystem?
#File Formats
#Parquet
#Avro
#Columnar vs Row-based
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How would you handle exactly-once processing semantics in a Kafka to BigQuery streaming pipeline?
#Exactly-Once
#Kafka
#BigQuery
#Idempotency
Difficulty Radar
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Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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