Company preparationGuide 7 of 10
Microsoft · Company guide · Guide 7 of 10
Microsoft Data Engineering Interview Preparation
Prepare for Data Engineering interviews at Microsoft using its published hiring and interview-tips pages, plus labelled practice questions on SQL, Spark, Azure-style pipelines and design.
On this page
Verified and attributed information
Microsoft publishes a 'How we hire' section and interview tips on its careers site, describing how to prepare before, during and after interviews.
Microsoft's interview tips describe the interview as a two-way conversation and note that some roles include technical exercises such as coding.
Sources
Reported candidate questions
None yet. A question appears here only with a named, attributable source.
Representative practice questions
These are practice questions written for this guide. They are not claimed to be questions this company has asked.
Given device telemetry events, write SQL to find devices that reported an error on three consecutive days.
Design an ingestion pipeline for product telemetry from millions of devices into a lakehouse. How do you handle schema changes from new client versions?
How would you make a nightly pipeline safe to rerun after a partial failure?
Compare a batch and a streaming design for a usage-billing report. Which would you choose and why?
Tell me about a time you learned a new technology quickly to deliver a project.
Preparation overview
Prepare in three areas: technical fundamentals, data system design, and behavioural stories. Microsoft’s own pages are the best starting point for the process; this guide focuses on the technical preparation.
Technology focus
Expect SQL, Python and distributed processing. If the role mentions Azure, map concepts you know to Azure services, but interviews generally reward fundamentals over product trivia. Revise PySpark fundamentals and idempotency.
System-design focus
Practise ingestion and schema-evolution designs: Kafka ingestion system and schema evolution patterns.
Behavioural preparation
Prepare stories about learning, collaboration and handling setbacks, with specific actions you took and what changed as a result.
What this guide does not claim
This page does not state Microsoft’s number of rounds, interview questions, levelling or pay. Where Microsoft publishes information about its process, it is summarised above with a link; read the source for current details.