The interviewer seemed surprised I hadn't prepped distributed systems more lol. Hacker rank was 2 questions. SQL assessment had Snowflake specific syntax for streaming data, more complex than expected. Superday had 4 sessions but couldn't answer the system design on distributed query optimization well enough
Questions Asked
1.“Serialize and deserialize a binary tree”
Microsoft
Data Engineer
Summer 2026No Offer
University of Waterloo · Computer Engineering
5th year · 3.7+ GPA · 3 past internships
DifficultStressfulVirtualLive coding
Live coding for an hour 3 questions easy then 2 mediums both mediums on tree traversal then turned into a casual chat about hobbies and interests nice interviewer but stressful process due to them not saying anything during the coding part lol
Deloitte
Data Engineer
Winter 2026No Offer
University of Toronto · Computer Science
5th year · 3.7+ GPA · 3 past internships
Multiple roundsUnexpected QuestionsTechnical
Two rounds, first behavioral and second super technical with hiring manager nothing too difficult just lots of specific system design questions that confused me
West Bend
Data Engineer
Summer 2026No Offer
University of Wisconsin-Madison · Data Science
3rd year · 3.3-3.6 GPA · 1 past internship
Multiple roundsVirtualBehavioral
Standard scenario questions. Felt that we clicked but no offer
Databricks
Data Engineer
San Francisco, CA
Winter 2025Accepted
Georgia Tech · Computer Science
4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships
Average Interview
TechnicalMultiple roundsVirtual
They care about code cleanliness not just correctness. Recruiter was quick and direct. Technical phone screen on Coder pad was a medium hard graph problem, I solved it but the code quality discussion ate a lot of time. Manager round was 30 min about my previous internship and what data engineering work I'd actually done
Questions Asked
1.“Design a key-value store. How do you handle persistence and replication?”
Tesla
Data Engineer
Fall 2026No Offer
Georgia Tech · Industrial Engineering
4th year · 3.7+ GPA · 2 past internships
BehavioralUnexpected QuestionsPoor Communication
Very unorthodox interview. Didn't ask about resume at all and had three standard behavioral questions. Only one round got ghosted after