The New York Times Company Data Engineer Interview Guide

The The New York Times Company data engineer loop, round by round: what each stage tests, example questions with the guidance interviewers actually score, the mistakes that sink strong candidates, and how to prepare.

Last updated: Proudly published by: Jeff Wahl

What the The New York Times Company loop tests: domains and difficulty

Our prediction of the question mix by domain and difficulty for this company's data engineer loop, from live listings and interview reports.

By domain
SQL
43%
6
Python
57%
8
By difficulty
Easy
57%
8
Medium
21%
3
Hard
21%
3

The domain and difficulty mix we predict for a The New York Times Company data engineer loop, across 14 problems. It updates as more The New York Times Company data lands.

Updated 14 predicted The New York Times Company problems

Try a The New York Times Company-style SQL round

Find every user active on 3 or more CONSECUTIVE days. This gaps-and-islands shape shows up in nearly every DE SQL round. Edit the query and run it against the seed data.

/* Users active on 3+ consecutive days. */
/* Hint: date minus a per-user ROW_NUMBER is constant within a streak. */
WITH streaks AS (
SELECT
user_id,
activity_date,
activity_date - CAST(
(ROW_NUMBER() OVER (
PARTITION BY user_id
ORDER BY activity_date
))
AS INT
) AS grp
FROM user_sessions
)
SELECT
user_id
FROM streaks
GROUP BY user_id, grp
HAVING COUNT(*) >= 3

Practice the The New York Times Company loop

The problems our model expects in this company's interview, grouped by round. Work the shapes that come up, not the ones that read well on a list.

The New York Times Company is hiring data engineers now

The roles behind this loop. Prep against the levels and locations they are actually filling.

The New York Times Company
Hiring now
The New York Times Company data engineer · live from career pages
6
open roles
The New York Times Company

Develop advanced data transformations using dbt (data build tool) for relational data modeling and PySpark for complex data processing within the Lakehouse, ensuring outputs meet strict SLAs and quality standards.

L4New York10d ago
The New York Times Company

Develop real-time data pipelines using event-driven architectures and streaming technologies.‬

L5New York10d ago
The New York Times Company

As a Software Engineer on the Experimentation & Instrumentation team, you will build and maintain interfaces and golden paths that make it easy for product teams to instrument experiments and behavioral events and connect experiment outcomes to downstream user behavior and engagement metrics.

L4New York57d ago
The New York Times Company

Develop advanced data transformations using dbt (data build tool) for relational data modeling and PySpark for large-scale data processing within the Lakehouse, ensuring outputs meet strict Service Level Agreements and quality standards.

L4New York126d ago
The New York Times Company

Create and maintain data quality frameworks, definitions, and metrics that are consistently applied across data domains, products, and key data assets

L5New York148d ago
New postings per week
10
3/2
10
3/23
10
6/1
20
7/20
week beginning · ~20 weeks of data
Where they hire
New York
6
Levels hiring
L43L52
Updated 6 open listings across 1 city

The New York Times Company compensation and culture

The numbers, tech stack, and team structure live on the company overview.

Data engineering at The New York Times Company→

The role, comp by level, tech stack, teams, and culture signals.

Compare The New York Times Company with other data engineering employers

How the role, pay, and loop stack up against peer companies.

Data engineering at Airbnb→

Compare the role, comp, and interview loop.

Data engineering at Amazon→

Compare the role, comp, and interview loop.

Data engineering at Apple→

Compare the role, comp, and interview loop.

Data engineering at Databricks→

Compare the role, comp, and interview loop.

02 / Why practice

Prepare at The New York Times Company interview difficulty

  1. 01

    Reading a solution is not the same as writing one

    Every engineer who has frozen on a query they had read a dozen times knows the gap. The only preparation that closes it is producing the answer yourself, under time, before the interview does it for you

  2. 02

    76% of hiring managers reject on the coding task, not the resume

    From HackerRank's 2024 Developer Skills Report. Candidates who look strong on paper still fail the live screen if they haven't done timed, executable practice

  3. 03

    5 problem shapes cover 80% of data engineer loops

    Dedup, sessionization, top-N-per-group, slowly-changing dimensions, partition tricks. Writing the shapes by hand turns the unfamiliar into pattern recognition

Practice The New York Times Company-level SQL

Related Guides

Data Engineering at The New York Times Company→

The The New York Times Company DE role, comp, tech stack, and culture.

DE Interview Prep Guide→

Complete preparation framework for data engineering interviews.

Data Modeling Questions→

Star schema, SCD, grain definition, and normalization.

Interview Prep

Data Engineer Interview Prep Guide→

50+ guides covering every round, company, and role

Interview Questions
SQLPythonData ModelingData PipelinePySparkAI Coding
Practice Problems
SQLPythonData ModelingData PipelinePySparkAI Coding
Guides & Tools
Data Engineer ResumeData Engineer RoadmapTop 100 QuestionsDE vs Data AnalystKafka vs KinesisData Mesh
By Company
NetflixAirbnbLyftUberTeslaSnowflake