Interview questions
Preparing for a data engineering interview at Nihilent? This page contains 11 real interview questions sourced from verified Nihilent interview experiences. Questions are sorted by frequency — the ones asked most often appear first.
Nihilent data engineering interviews typically focus on SQL, Cloud/Tools, and Spark/Big Data. The interview bar skews toward harder problems (5 hard vs. 4 easy), suggesting emphasis on depth and system-level thinking.
Use the difficulty filters above to focus your preparation. For each question, attempt your own answer first, then compare with our expert solution. You can also practice these questions in our AI Mock Interview Coach for real-time feedback.
Explain the differences between Repartition and Coalesce. When would you use each?
Explain the types of triggers in ADF, including schedule, tumbling window, and event-based triggers.
Joins and window functions - INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL OUTER, ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), DENSE_RANK()
Can you explain the architecture of Apache Spark and its components?
Running multiple notebooks - dbutils.notebook.run()
Types of Integration Runtimes (IR) - self-hosted, Azure, SSIS
Unity Catalog - role in managing and securing data
Highlight the tools and technologies you've used in your current project
Python libraries - Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib for data processing
Writing Excel sheets to Delta tables in Databricks
Discuss designing a data pipeline for a specific use case
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