Nielsen Data Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 15 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Nielsen.
Nielsen
Big Data Engineer
Mid Average Negative experience No offer 3 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding
The interview had 3 stages. The first stage was a screening round to test domain knowledge about the job role. It had questions from SQL, SCALA/Python, and Spark. SQL had simple GroupBy questions. Spark had basic aggregation functions. Python was about finding even numbers. There were also questions from spark/command line/aws/Apache DAG. The second round was unexpected, with questions about spark-submit syntax and UDFs. The interviewer had audio issues, making it hard to understand. Questions included connecting Spark with Oracle/Hive, SQL join types, connecting Spark with different databases and AWS S3, removing duplicates from tables, UDF syntax, spark-submit syntax, and creating Hive tables.
Confirmed questions7 questions
- What are the different types of joins in SQL?
- How would you connect Spark with different databases, and can you provide the syntax for it?
- How would you connect AWS S3 with Spark?
Nielsen
Data Engineer
Senior Average Neutral experience No offer 4 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Onsite Background check Phone screen
Interview formats
Technical Behavioral
Started with a phone interview to get a general sense of my background. Then I had an onsite interview that covered both technical and behavioral aspects. The next day there was a short HR interview, and I got positive feedback suggesting an offer was likely. However, the following day, the situation changed. It seemed the original position was on hold, and they believed I'd be a better fit for a different role. This led to a technical phone call with another team, but their requirements, focused on core AWS skills, were different from the initial job description and the interview didn't last long. Ultimately, no offer was extended. It felt like one team was interested but couldn't meet my salary expectations, even though they initially agreed. The other team's focus on specific AWS skills didn't align with my experience for that particular interview.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Can you discuss your experience with Spark?
- Were there any algorithm or coding challenges during the interview process?
Nielsen
Data Engineer
Entry Average Positive experience Accept offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen
Interview formats
Coding Technical Behavioral
Had a general intro, then we talked about my prior tech stack. They asked about the scale of data I've handled, what I did, and what effect it had. Then some coding challenges: finding the longest substring with unique chars, and checking if two strings are anagrams in linear time without sorting. Finally, a SQL problem about identifying products with prices that constantly went up month over month from a pricing table.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Basic questions on Spark, Python, and SQL were asked.
- There were also some questions about Data Modelling.
Nielsen Data Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Nielsen interview reports.
“Write a function to replace the second occurrence of a character in a string with '#'.”
Read reports →“What is the syntax for spark-submit?”
Read reports →“How would you split words in a file and count their frequency using PySpark?”
Read reports →“What distinguishes a POST API request from a PUT API request?”
Read reports →“How do you perform addition of linked list nodes?”
Read report →“What are UDFs in Spark, and what is their syntax?”
Read report →“How would you count the occurrences of an element within a list?”
Read report →“What are partition and bucketing in Spark?”
Read report →“How do you create a table in Hive?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 15 Nielsen interview reports.