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Known as the original mobile payment processing app, Square (now Block Inc.) has been making waves since its first launch because of its high adoption rates. It could get such reasonable rates because it lets businesses accept card payments without relying on cash or peer-to-peer payment apps.
As a data engineer, your work will impact numerous stakeholders across the company. So get ready for an extensive interview process and some particularly grilling Square data engineer interview questions.
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You'll need a well-rounded strategy when preparing for Square data engineer interview questions. To help you out, in this article, we’ll cover:
- Role and Responsibilities of a Square Data Engineer
- Square Data Engineer Interview Process
- Top Square Data Engineer Interview Questions
- Square Data Engineer’s Salary
- FAQs on Square Data Engineer Interview Questions
Role and Responsibilities of a Square Data Engineer
Depending on the department you apply for, your duties as a data engineer at Square will vary. For instance, if you join the marketing team as a data engineer, you’ll help develop foundational data and reporting infrastructure to accelerate the company’s growth and boost revenue.
You’ll work with various teams to create great data pipelines and dashboards and develop processes that’ll pull together various complex sets of data stores to guide Square in making the correct large investment decisions.
Your day-to-day responsibilities will include:
- Working on data foundation and architecture, along with data pipelines and dashboards, to make sure that the business reporting is done accurately
- Collaborating with business leads to gauge their data and reporting requirements better so that they can be translated into Product Requirement Definitions and technical specifications
- Offering expertise for the end-to-end data flow of the marketing department
- Constantly work on reducing the gap between business requirements and technical implementation with the help of scalable solutions and communicating the same to high-level stakeholders
- Keeping track of the daily progress, identifying and fixing issues and business pipelines to make sure that all SLAs are met with internal stakeholders
- Mentoring data engineers and analysts and using the best data engineering practices
As you can see, this is just one example. When preparing for Square data engineer interview questions, keep the responsibilities that accompany your role in mind, as they will play an essential role in the type of behavioral questions asked.
Square Data Engineer Interview Process
Typically, the interview process for a data engineer at Square is something like this:
- Phone Screen: Around 45 minutes to an hour-long conversation with the hiring manager, where you’ll be asked about your previous work experience and expectations from the role.
- Technical Round: Next up is a technical interview where your SQL skills will be tested using CoderPad on Google Meet. You’ll be asked Square data engineer interview questions of medium Leetcode level of difficulty. You’ll be asked to explain your problem-solving approach, so be prepared for that.
- On-site Interviews: Consists of around 7 rounds where your technical, behavioral, and soft skills will be assessed. As per candidates who have previously interviewed at Square, they put a lot of focus on determining whether you’ll be a good fit for the company or not.
Ensure that you research the company thoroughly before appearing for the interview because many Square data engineer questions will be asked based on that. It would be best to study Square using a holistic approach that extends beyond the fundamentals of the role. You can also read how to prepare for data engineer interviews to get interview-ready.
Don’t forget to prep your resume as well with the help of the data engineer resume guide.
Top Square Data Engineer Interview Questions
As you gear up for your upcoming interview, here are some examples of the kind of Square data engineer interview questions you can expect:
Technical Interview Questions
- Given: Two tables — payments and users. The payments table holds all payments between users with the payment_state column consisting of either "success" or "failed."
Find: The number of customers that signed up in January 2020 who had a combined (successful) sending and receiving volume greater than $100 in their first 30 days.
- Given: An employees and departments table.
Find: Choose the top 3 departments with at least ten employees and arrange them according to the percentage of their employees making over 100K in salary.
- Given: A table of students and their SAT scores.
Find: A query that’ll return the two students with the closest test scores with the score difference. Also, if there is more than one student with the same minimum score difference, choose the student name combination that is higher in the alphabet.
- Given: A table of product subscriptions with each user's subscription start date and end date.
Find: A query that returns true or false whether or not each user has a subscription date range that overlaps with any other completed subscription.
- How would you write an SQL query to create a histogram of the number of comments per user in January 2022?
Data Science Interview Questions
- What procedure would you use to check whether a new credit risk scoring model works and what’s the data you’ll consider?
- What are the different places where K-Means can be applied within Square?
- Elaborate on your favorite Machine Learning Algorithm in detail.
- When training a model, how would you ensure that you’re not overfitting it?
- Given a time series chart with many ups and downs, how would you determine the peaks?
You can also look at some top Data Engineer Interview Questions for practice.
Further, these are the technologies Square uses, so practice questions based on these as well:
- Python and SQL (difficulty level — medium Leetcode)
- Data visualization technologies such as Looker
- ETL scheduling technologies with dependency checking, such as Airflow
- Linux/OSX command line and version control software (Git)
- A/B Testing, Analytics, Algorithm, Statistics, and Probability
- Machine Learning, Product Metrics, and Business Cases
To kickstart your prep, here are 50+ SQL Interview Questions and Tips on How to Crack Them and Square Interview Questions.
Square Data Engineer’s Salary
According to Glassdoor.com, a Square data engineer makes $111,172 per year, on average. This is, naturally, not the final figure because the Square data engineer salary package depends on a number of factors such as location, experience, job role, and so on.
Here’s how Square compares with the top tech companies in terms of salary:
- Apple Data Engineer Salary All Levels
- Amazon Data Engineer Salary
- Google Data Engineer Salaries
- Facebook Data Engineer Salaries at Different Levels
Remember to brush up your SQL and Python skills, and be prepared to face several interviews to become a Square data engineer. Owing to its startup-like work environment, Square has a lot to offer in terms of growth opportunities, and you’ll get to be a part of an elite group of engineers.
FAQs on Square Data Engineer Interview Questions
Q1. What questions are asked in data engineer interviews?
When preparing for a data engineer interview, you can expect questions such as What is meant by Balancer in HDFS? Why does Hadoop use Context object? Explain the importance of Distributed Cache in Apache Hadoop.
Q2. How to prepare for a Square interview?
When preparing for a tech interview at Square, give yourself at least one week to prepare for behavioral questions. Research the interview questions asked before and start practicing. You can practice mock interviews to be better prepared.
Q3. How long does the Square interview process take?
On average, the entire interview process at Square takes around 4-6 weeks to complete.
Q4. How to prepare for a big data engineer interview?
When preparing for a big data engineer interview, you’ll need to develop skills such as Python, SQL, data modeling, data pipelines, system design, etc.
Q5. What’s the average Square data engineer salary?
On average, the Square data engineer's salary is $111,172 per year (as per glassdoor.com).
How to Crack a Data Engineer Interview
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