Warner Bros. Discovery

A hard CoderPad SQL, a five-transformation pandas/PySpark round + APIs, and an AWS Glue/Kinesis + governance focus.

Cloud / platform

AWS-heavy: Glue, Kinesis, S3; Spark

Reported difficulty

Not reported

SQLPythonPySparkAWS (Glue/Kinesis)APIs

Hiring process

Phone screen

Hard SQL (CoderPad)

5 transformations + API

Final (experience + Spark + design)

Offer

Round-by-round breakdown

3

01

SQL

Medium confidence

A hard-level SQL question on CoderPad
Window functions, complex joins, optimization

02

Transformations / PySpark

High confidence

A dataset with five transformations to write in pandas or PySpark
3 questions on APIs

03

Final

Medium confidence

Past experience, Spark optimization, pipeline design (partly HR)

System & pipeline design prompts

1

Streaming/ad/content pipeline on AWS (Glue/Kinesis): ingestion → processing → serving → monitoring; governance

Rejection patterns

4

Ignoring the governance slice
Weak hard-SQL
Shaky pandas/PySpark transformations
No AWS Glue/Kinesis experience

Reported experiences

1

Data Engineer II (~3 YoE)

ReportedFirst-hand

Hard SQL on CoderPad → dataset with 5 transformations (pandas/PySpark) + 3 API questions → final (past experience, Spark optimization, pipeline design).

Hiring process

Round-by-round breakdown

SQL

Transformations / PySpark

Final

System & pipeline design prompts

Prep — high priority

Prep — medium priority

Rejection patterns

Reported experiences

Data Engineer II (~3 YoE)

Rehearse for Warner Bros. Discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery

Hiring process

Round-by-round breakdown

SQL

Transformations / PySpark

Final

System & pipeline design prompts

Prep — high priority

Prep — medium priority

Rejection patterns

Reported experiences

Data Engineer II (~3 YoE)

Rehearse for Warner Bros. Discovery