Apple

Role: Cloud Data Engineer

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: 2024-04-09

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Not Specified

Difficulty: Hard

Rounds: 9 rounds (Resume Screening, Telephonic Discussion, Technical Interview I, Technical Interview II, Technical Interview III (On-Campus), Managerial Interview, and more details not fully specified but implied multiple technical deep dives)

Topics Asked: Data Pipelines (Cloud, Snowflake), SQL (Advanced SQL, window functions, Nth highest/lowest), AWS, PySpark, Python, Data Science, String Manipulation, System Design (data pipeline design, data loading frameworks, performance tuning), Behavioral

Experience:

The candidate described the entire interview journey as "quite hard," comprising nine major rounds. The role's job description focused on experience in developing data pipelines on cloud, data warehouse solutions in Snowflake, SQL, Advanced SQL, AWS, PySpark, Python, and Data Science.

Round 1: Resume Screening
Applied through the official careers portal. Resume was shortlisted after a month.

Round 2: Telephonic Discussion
A 40-minute telephonic discussion with HR to clarify skillset, work experience, interests, achievements, certifications, and future plans. The HR had the CV and discussed projects and tech stack, asking the candidate to rate themselves in various technologies. This round also helped the candidate understand the role and expectations.

Round 3: Technical Interview - I
Started with introductions, followed by discussions on past work experience, projects, and conceptual questions. A coding problem was given. The specific coding question was not detailed in the snippet provided.

Round 4: Technical Interview - II
This round was similar to the first technical interview but with more complex SQL queries. Questions included: "Given a string, return the modified string having the character and its consistent count in least possible complexity." Also, given tables (Orders, Customers & Products), the candidate was asked to write queries using multiple join techniques to find Nth highest and lowest data. Questions about window functions, listing some, and differentiating between RANK() and DENSE_RANK() with examples were also asked.

Round 5: Technical Interview - III (On-Campus)
This round was conducted face-to-face on campus and focused on design and architectural aspects. Questions included: "Design end-to-end data pipeline handling peta bytes of data." Other questions were about different data loading frameworks and the best ones for least latency, and various performance tuning techniques implemented and their results.

Round 6: Managerial Interview
A typical 30-minute managerial interview with questions such as: "What is that thing making you willing to join Apple?" "What are different challenges you have faced in your so far work experience?" "What are the achievements you have and some moments which you are proud of?" "How do you generally deal with a critical situation in life?" "What are some mistakes you have done and what are sections of improvement?"