Started with a 30 mins zoom video call with the recruiter, asked variety of questions and took notes based on my responses. None of them were deep, just getting an idea of the projects I've worked on, tools and techniques I'm comfortable with etc. (Essentially checking if I check all their boxes from their job requirements) So far so good.
Next round - technical, again zoom video with their Data Engineer(?) (Not sure because they don't seem to know anything about Big Data or its infrastructure, but the title said DE, anyway!) The interview tested SQL skills, 2 questions. First one was pretty straight forward: count, group by query. Second one, very wordy and confusing. Too much verbose and I had a hard time understanding what exactly was expected out of this problem. The interviewer was very friendly and tried to help me understand but failed. It seemed like they wanted to fir many things in one SQL query trying to make it complex, but it didn't make any sense. I got the query right (with some help from the interviewer and he verified the solution with his, and said it is right) - it included min, max, avg, group by, inner query containing some where clause and between. Oh there was also dense_rank() over partition and order by, and Datediff() . Yes, I had to use all of these to write one query - pretty sure the problem statement could have been written in a more understandable way. - Other than this very complex SQL, the rapport with the interviewer was pretty good and our interests, expectations aligned well.
We closed the call with pleasantries and the interviewer mentioned I'll hear from the recruiters regarding next steps (which was on-site interview). Here's what happened next - they sent me a generic rejection from a no-reply box. No feedback, no reasons. After what it felt like a great interview. Not cool.