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Cloud database engineer, database engineer and database reliability engineer interviews at Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the AI-first companies go deeper than any other loop on one layer: how data is stored, kept consistent, scaled, moved and recovered. Expect the engine questions (indexes, isolation, replication lag), the scale questions (a shard key and what it makes expensive), the money-path questions (idempotency, exactly-once, payments), and the operational half most preparation skips — a live migration with near-zero downtime and a restore against a stated recovery objective. This plan sequences the site's questions, guides, quizzes and concept pages into six weeks, easiest first, with a free week one so you can judge the format before paying for anything.
Built for someone with a few weeks before a database engineer, cloud database, database reliability or data infrastructure loop who already runs a database in production and can write the SQL. If your loop is a general cloud or platform loop, weeks two, three and five still apply; use the cloud engineer role path for the rest.
Nine weeks, 53 steps, about 26 hours. Week one is free with no account.
Weeks 1, 2 of the six-week plan, combined.
Six weeks at roughly four to five hours a week, or about 26 hours in total. The plan compresses to as few as two weeks by dropping the optional steps first, and stretches to twelve; the core questions stay in every version.
Week one is entirely free with no account: the choosing-a-database discussion question, three concept pages, both design questions and the quiz. Weeks two to six use Pro questions for the design and coding rounds; every blog post, concept page, quiz and tool stays free throughout.
Progress is derived from questions you have completed and quizzes you have taken, not from a stored position in the plan. If you solved the key-value store last month, the plan already shows it done. Reading steps are not tracked, so the percentage counts questions and quizzes only.
Week one is free. From week 2 the plan uses 24 Pro questions and 2 Pro behavioral guides; the posts, concept pages, quizzes and tools stay free.
See Pro pricingSay what an isolation level actually promises, what the write-ahead log is for, and what replication lag does to a read — then build the structures the engine is made of.
Database loops rarely ask algorithm puzzles; they ask you to build the pieces. An LRU cache is the buffer pool question, a min-heap is the priority queue behind every scheduler, a trie is an index. Build each once so you can talk about what the engine does underneath.
Weeks 2, 3 of the six-week plan, combined.
Database loops rarely ask algorithm puzzles; they ask you to build the pieces. An LRU cache is the buffer pool question, a min-heap is the priority queue behind every scheduler, a trie is an index. Build each once so you can talk about what the engine does underneath.
Only if the three above felt routine. LFU is the eviction policy real caches actually argue about; a running median is what a streaming statistics job maintains.
Choose a shard key and say what it makes expensive, size a cache tier, and keep a booking correct under contention — the week that separates database engineers from generalists.
Weeks 3, 4 of the six-week plan, combined.
Weeks 4, 5 of the six-week plan, combined.
The half of the loop only database-titled roles have — move a live database without downtime, restore against a stated objective, and explain a bill.
Weeks 5, 6 of the six-week plan, combined.
The storage engines that are not a relational database, the behavioral round that vetoes strong technical loops, then one full hard design under time.
Typically a design round on a storage-heavy system — a key-value store, a booking or payment system, a migration — a discussion round on choosing, scaling and operating a database, a coding round that builds a structure rather than solving a puzzle, and a behavioral round. Database reliability loops add an operational round on backups, restores and incident handling. The plan gives each a week.
Not as a drill — the site has no SQL puzzle questions, and loops for these roles rarely test syntax. It covers what the SQL sits on: indexes, isolation levels, the write-ahead log, replication, sharding and migrations, which is what the questions in these loops actually turn on.
Weeks two to four apply — a data engineer loop asks the same consistency, queue and change-data-capture questions. What it adds is pipeline design: batch versus streaming, late data, backfills and orchestration, which this plan does not yet cover. A dedicated data engineer plan is planned once the question bank carries those questions.