DSA for Data Engineers

The DSA handbook written for data engineers — not generic LeetCode grinders.

Here's the problem with most interview prep: it's built for software engineers solving abstract puzzles. But data engineering interviews are different. You're expected to connect algorithms to pipelines, joins, partitioning, and streaming systems — and most resources never make that link. This handbook does, on every page.

Built around 10 patterns that cover the vast majority of questions

Instead of drilling hundreds of disconnected problems, you'll master 10 reusable patterns: Sliding Window, Two Pointers, Merge Intervals, Binary Search Variants, Hashing & Frequency Counting, Sorting & Custom Comparators, Heaps, Greedy, Dynamic Programming, and Topological Sort. Once you can recognize a pattern from the problem statement, unfamiliar questions stop being scary.

What's inside

• 50 fully solved problems — each with the problem statement, interview clues, a brute-force baseline, the optimized approach, a hand-traced dry run, complexity analysis, and production considerations that tie the solution back to real data engineering work.
• 100 categorized interview questions — split into Easy, Medium, and Hard, every one tagged by pattern and linked to LeetCode or GeeksforGeeks so you can drill efficiently.
• Python and SQL templates — reusable code you can adapt mid-interview, plus the SQL framing data engineers are actually tested on.
• A pattern decision flowchart — read a problem, follow the signals, land on the right pattern in under two minutes.
• A full systems chapter — see exactly where each pattern lives inside Spark, Flink, Kafka, Airflow, warehouses, ETL, data quality, and lineage systems.
• 6 cheat sheets — Big-O, pattern recognition, Python DSA, graph, tree, and dynamic programming references for the night before your interview.

Who it's for

Data engineers preparing for interviews — from your first role to senior and staff loops — plus analytics engineers, BI developers, and backend engineers moving into data. If you've ever passed a take-home but frozen on a live coding round, this is built for you.

Why it works

Every problem ends with how it shows up in production: a Spark dedup, an external sort merge, skew detection, session stitching, percentile monitoring. You don't just learn to pass the interview — you learn to reason about the systems you'll build afterward. It also includes a 7-phase interview framework and a 6-week study plan, so you know exactly what to do between today and interview day.

90 pages. Python + SQL. Zero fluff.

Recognize the pattern. Solve it with confidence. Get the offer.