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What skills are being tested in a data engineer system design interview?

Mariel September 6, 2026 Data engineer, Google, System design
1 answer
Top answer by
Profile picture for Nimesh P.
Nimesh P.
Data engineer, Data engineering manager, Data science manager +3 others
Google, Overjet, Ripple
5.0 avg rating, 3 clients
Answered September 7, 2026
  • ability to design end-to-end data pipelines
  • understanding of ETL/ELT approaches
  • SQL and schema design
  • OLTP vs OLAP
  • data warehouse / lake concepts
  • handling of batch vs streaming
  • experience with tools/platforms like BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, Spark, Kafka
  • thinking around data quality, deduplication, late data, backfills, and observability
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