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Discussion on: Data Engineering Interview Prep (2026): What Actually Matters (SQL, Pipelines, System Design)

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Hadil Ben Abdallah

That’s a really good callout. I’ve been noticing the same shift. The fundamentals (SQL, modeling, pipelines) are still the foundation, but now they’re being applied in very different contexts, especially with LLM-driven workflows.
What you said about interviews evolving from “design a warehouse” to “design a pipeline with rate limits, retries, and cost constraints” is spot on; it forces you to think not just about data, but about reliability and trade-offs in a much more dynamic system.
And yeah, tools like orchestration frameworks are becoming part of the conversation much earlier than before.