Rbcroyalbank Interview Questions & Experiences

Rbcroyalbank·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a Data Engineer role at RBC Royal Bank. The technical questions were pretty focused on pandas fundamentals and SQL, nothing too wild, but the duplicate-finding problem had a part B that tripped me up a bit.

What is the difference between a pandas Series and a pandas DataFrame?
What is the difference between WHERE and HAVING in SQL, and when do you use each with GROUP BY and aggregates?
Write SQL to return emails that appear more than once in a users table, along with their duplicate count.
Now return the full rows for every user whose email is duplicated, not just the email itself.

“Knew this cold.”

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Rbcroyalbank·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a Data Engineer internship at RBC Royal Bank. Three short technical questions, all focused on data manipulation basics. Nothing too wild but the SQL dedup one took me longer than I expected.

In pandas, what is the difference between a Series and a DataFrame? Cover dimensionality, indexing, and when you'd use each.
What is the difference between WHERE and HAVING in SQL? When does each filter get applied, and can you use aggregate functions in them?
Given a table called transactions_raw with columns for ingest_id, account_id, transaction_id, amount, and a UTC timestamp, write a SQL query that finds all duplicate rows (same account_id, transaction_id, amount, and timestamp) and returns those groups along with a count of duplicates.

“Knew this one cold.”

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Rbcroyalbank·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a Data Engineer role at RBC Royal Bank. The session was behavioral and technical, focused heavily on pipeline work and data quality. Nothing too surprising but a couple of the questions pushed me to think through things I'd mostly done on autopilot.

What specific skills from your Master's program made you better at building or operating data pipelines?
How do you handle schema differences between source and target systems in an ETL pipeline, and when do you choose strict enforcement versus allowing schema evolution?
How do you ensure data integrity end-to-end across ingestion, transformation, and warehouse layers, and what checks do you put in place at each stage?
Describe a difficult pipeline problem you ran into, what caused it, what you changed, and what you took away from it.

“Easier than expected but I still fumbled it a bit.”

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Rbcroyalbank·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026

Short technical screen for a Data Engineer co-op at RBC, mostly pandas fundamentals and SQL. Nothing too wild but the query task had a small wrinkle I almost missed.

What is the difference between a pandas Series and a DataFrame, and when would you actually use each?
In SQL, what is the difference between WHERE and HAVING, and when should you use one versus the other?
Given a customer_events table with columns for event_id, customer_email, source_system, and created_at, write a SQL query to find all email addresses that appear more than once, returning the email and the count of duplicates.

“Pretty basic but I fumbled the 'when would you use each' part a bit.”

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Rbcroyalbank·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Technical screen for a Data Engineer co-op at RBC, all resume and experience based, no leetcode. Five questions covering background, skills from grad school, and some solid pipeline design stuff. Pretty conversational but they clearly wanted specifics, not hand-wavy answers.

Walk us through your background, your current master's program, and where you see your career going long-term.
What technical skills from your master's program are most directly applicable to data engineering work?
In an ETL pipeline, how do you handle schema mismatches between source systems and your target tables?
How do you make sure data stays accurate and complete from the moment it's ingested all the way to the final tables?
Tell me about a hard problem you ran into while building a data pipeline. What caused it, how did you debug it, and what did you change so it wouldn't happen again?

“Classic opener but I still fumbled the transition between my undergrad work and why I pivoted to a master's.”

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