Data Engineer interview at Urban Company with 2 YOE
Summary
I recently interviewed for a Data Engineer position at Urban Company with 2 years of experience. The process included an assignment and a domain knowledge interview, but unfortunately, I was ultimately rejected.
Full Experience
My interview journey with Urban Company started after I received a call from their HR department for a Data Engineer opportunity.
The first step was an assignment that I needed to complete within a day. It involved building a Lightweight MySQL ORM Layer with Dual Write Support. This task tested my practical coding and database interaction skills.
Following the assignment, I was invited for a 'Domain Knowledge Interview.' In this round, the discussion revolved around various data engineering concepts and systems. We delved into topics like Kafka, Change Data Capture (CDC), and real-time streaming architectures. There was no discussion about the assignment during this round.
Despite my performance in the interview, the verdict was rejection.
Interview Questions (4)
Design a user clickstream data pipeline. Explain how to fetch and store this data, clarify why direct writing to S3 is not feasible, and justify the use of Kafka as an initial data ingestion layer.
Describe your approach to exposing OLAP data through an API for consumption by microservices. Additionally, explain how you would build and expose real-time dashboards based on this data.
Explain how your company manages Data Governance.
Discuss Kafka architecture and how you would handle increased data size and scaling challenges.