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Describe ETL and pipeline challenges

RbcroyalbankData Engineer · Technical Screen
EasyData EngineerTechnical ScreenBehavioral & Leadership

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An RBC Data Engineer co-op/intern technical screen combining behavioral and technical prompts: self-introduction, skills from a master's program, handling ETL schema differences, ensuring data integrity, and a STAR story about debugging a pipeline failure. The model answer gives concrete frameworks for schema evolution, multi-stage integrity checks, and root-cause analysis.

Question

You are interviewing for a Data Engineer co-op / intern role at RBC (Royal Bank of Canada). The technical screen is a set of resume-based and experience-based prompts. Give concise but specific answers, using concrete examples, trade-offs, and how you would validate that your solution worked.

  1. Give a brief self-introduction covering your background, your current master's program, and your long-term career goals.
  2. What new technical skills has your master's program given you that are directly relevant to data engineering?
  3. In an ETL pipeline, how would you handle schema differences between upstream source systems and the downstream target tables?
  4. How would you ensure data integrity throughout the pipeline, from ingestion all the way to the final tables?
  5. Describe a difficult issue you encountered while building a data pipeline. Include the root cause, how you diagnosed and debugged it, and what you changed to prevent the same class of issue from happening again.

Answer as if you were a strong candidate.