I've given around 8 interviews in the last month and this was the worst experience I've had. I can tell that the interviewers were not at all prepared for the interview and were struggling to find questions to test my skills.
They did not even have any techincal questions prepared beforehand and googled the questions in the middle of the interview to ask me. They also did not initiate any whiteboard / coding environment where they could ask me to write code. I literally had to verbally speak the code out to them. For one questions, the recruiter literally asked me make up my own dataset and write the answer in a text editor on my computer and then share the screen.
One of the recruiters would not even let me speak more than one sentence before interrupting and changing the direction of my thoughts ( I understand that they want to get the answers that they are looking for but there's a way to do it. I've actually taken 53 interviews at Amazon so I know it) . They wanted me to turn on my video but they themselves did not even offer to turn their videos on even as a courtsey to make sure the candidate is feeling comfortable.
The position said Data Engineer but the job description on the website and what the recruiters told me was more of a Business Analyst or BIE.
It has multiple rounds each of 30 mins or depends on the manager who is taking it.
There are 4 rounds including the HR rounds.
Questions were logical needs critical thinking one should have development knowledge like pyspark, sql
The technical interview lasts about one hour. The interviewer is not an employee of the company, but from a third-party interviewing platform, and the interview time is quite flexible interview time is quite flexible.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The interview mainly focused on SQL, Python coding, and some general technical Data Engineering questions.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Citi (Toronto, ON) in Mar 2026
Interview
screening, karat interview scenario based. Coding interview for the first round and a lot of scenario-based questions even on ML on 2nd interview. both the interview lasted 1 hr and 2nd interview barely gave 10 min for sql 3 cte query