What is a Data Engineer at American Express Global Business Travel?

As a Data Engineer at American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), you are at the heart of the world’s leading B2B travel platform. Your work directly enables the processing, storage, and analysis of massive volumes of global travel and transaction data. This role is critical because the data pipelines you build empower corporate clients to manage travel spend, ensure traveler safety, and optimize their global operations.

You will impact products that serve thousands of global enterprises and millions of business travelers. By designing robust ETL/ELT pipelines and maintaining scalable data architectures, you ensure that downstream analytics, reporting, and machine learning models are powered by accurate, timely data. The complexity of handling global financial and travel data requires a meticulous approach to data governance, security, and performance.

Expect a role that balances technical rigor with significant business influence. You will collaborate closely with software engineers, product managers, and data scientists to translate complex business requirements into resilient data infrastructure. If you thrive in an environment where your technical decisions directly shape enterprise-level business intelligence, this role offers a compelling mix of scale, complexity, and strategic value.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the types of technical and behavioral inquiries you will face during your Amex GBT interviews. They are designed to test your practical knowledge and how you apply it to real-world scenarios. Use these to identify patterns in what the company values, rather than treating them as a strict memorization list.

Past Projects & Behavioral

These questions assess your hands-on experience, your ability to articulate your past work, and how you handle workplace challenges.

• Walk me through the architecture of the most complex data pipeline you have built.
• Tell me about a time you found a significant data discrepancy in production. How did you handle it?
• Describe a situation where you had to push back on a product manager's data request.
• How do you ensure your data pipelines are documented and maintainable by other engineers?
• Tell me about a time you optimized a slow-running process. What was the impact?

SQL & Data Modeling

These questions test your ability to query complex datasets and design structures for analytical reporting.

• Write a query to calculate the rolling 7-day average of flight bookings per corporate client.
• Explain the difference between a star schema and a snowflake schema. When would you use each?
• How would you design a data model to track user interactions on our corporate booking platform?
• What are window functions, and can you provide an example of when you would use RANK() versus DENSE_RANK()?
• How do you handle slowly changing dimensions (SCD) in a data warehouse?

Coding & Architecture

These questions evaluate your programming proficiency and your ability to design scalable data systems.

• Write a Python function to parse a directory of CSV files, filter out invalid records, and aggregate the results.
• How would you architect a pipeline to ingest real-time currency exchange rates and apply them to historical booking data?
• Explain how you would use Apache Airflow to manage dependencies between multiple daily batch jobs.
• What strategies do you use to test your data pipelines before deploying them to production?
• How do you handle out-of-memory errors when processing large datasets in Python or Spark?

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Thorough preparation requires understanding exactly what the hiring team values. You should approach your preparation by aligning your technical skills and past experiences with the core competencies expected at Amex GBT.

Role-Related Knowledge You must demonstrate a strong command of foundational data engineering technologies, primarily SQL, Python, and cloud data platforms. Interviewers evaluate your ability to write efficient code and your understanding of data warehousing concepts. You can show strength here by discussing specific tools you have used to build scalable data pipelines.

Problem-Solving Ability This criterion focuses on how you approach ambiguous data challenges. Interviewers want to see your methodology for troubleshooting failing pipelines, optimizing slow queries, and designing architectures from scratch. Demonstrate this by walking through your thought process clearly before jumping into a technical solution.

Experience and Project Depth Amex GBT places a heavy emphasis on your past projects. Interviewers evaluate the real-world impact of your previous work, the technical trade-offs you made, and your specific contributions to a team. You can excel here by preparing detailed narratives about your most complex data engineering projects, focusing on the "why" and "how."

Culture Fit and Communication Working in a global, highly regulated enterprise requires excellent communication and a collaborative mindset. Interviewers assess your ability to work cross-functionally and manage stakeholder expectations. Show strength by highlighting instances where you successfully communicated technical constraints to non-technical business partners.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Data Engineer at Amex GBT is thorough and often heavily concentrated. After an initial recruiter screening—which may sometimes take a few weeks to schedule—candidates typically move into a consolidated interview phase. You should be prepared for a "super day" format, where you will face multiple back-to-back interviews on the same day.

These sessions will cover a mix of coding exercises, deep dives into your past projects, and behavioral assessments. The company values practical experience over theoretical trivia, so expect interviewers to heavily probe your resume. They want to understand exactly what you built, the challenges you faced, and how your solutions impacted the business.

Because the process often involves multiple interviewers in a single day, maintaining your energy and clearly communicating your thought process consistently across different sessions is vital. The hiring philosophy here is deeply rooted in collaboration, so your interactions with each interviewer will be evaluated collectively to gauge your overall fit for the team.

This visual timeline breaks down the typical stages of the Amex GBT interview loop, from the initial recruiter screen to the final technical and behavioral rounds. Use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you are ready for the endurance required during the multi-interview stage. Keep in mind that specific rounds may vary slightly depending on the exact team and region.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Past Projects and Experience Deep Dive

Your past experience is a cornerstone of the Amex GBT evaluation process. Interviewers will dissect your resume to verify your hands-on experience and understand your depth of knowledge. Strong performance in this area means you can articulate the business value of your past projects, explain your specific technical contributions, and defend the architectural choices you made.

Be ready to go over:

• End-to-End Pipeline Design – How you ingested data, transformed it, and delivered it to end-users.
• Technical Trade-offs – Why you chose a specific database, framework, or cloud service over alternatives.
• Failure and Recovery – Instances where a pipeline failed in production and how you resolved it.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Strategies for handling late-arriving data, schema evolution, and real-time streaming architectures.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through the most complex data pipeline you built in your current role. What were the bottlenecks?"
• "Explain a time when you had to migrate data from a legacy system. How did you ensure data integrity?"
• "Describe a situation where your project requirements changed midway. How did you adapt your data model?"

Coding and Algorithms

As a Data Engineer, you must be proficient in writing clean, scalable code to manipulate data. This area is evaluated through practical coding exercises, typically focusing on Python and SQL. A strong candidate writes optimized, readable code and proactively considers edge cases, null values, and performance implications.

Be ready to go over:

• Advanced SQL – Window functions, complex joins, subqueries, and query optimization techniques.
• Data Manipulation in Python – Using libraries like Pandas or PySpark to clean, aggregate, and transform datasets.
• Core Algorithms – Basic data structures and algorithms, particularly those relevant to data parsing and transformation.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Object-oriented programming principles applied to custom ETL frameworks.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a SQL query to find the top three spending corporate clients per region over the last fiscal year."
• "Given a raw, nested JSON file of travel bookings, write a Python script to flatten and clean the data."
• "How would you optimize a query that is currently timing out on a table with 500 million rows?"

Data Architecture and Modeling

Understanding how to structure data for analytical consumption is critical. Interviewers will test your knowledge of data warehousing principles and your ability to design scalable architectures. Strong candidates can design logical and physical data models that balance storage costs, query performance, and ease of use for downstream analytics.

Be ready to go over:

• Data Modeling – Star and snowflake schemas, dimensional modeling, and fact vs. dimension tables.
• ETL vs. ELT – Understanding the differences and knowing when to apply each pattern.
• Cloud Infrastructure – Familiarity with cloud data warehouses (like Snowflake or Redshift) and scalable storage solutions.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Data mesh principles, automated data governance, and implementing CI/CD for data pipelines.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a data model for a new hotel booking feature. What facts and dimensions would you include?"
• "How would you architect a daily batch pipeline to process 10TB of transaction logs?"
• "Explain how you would implement data quality checks within an automated ELT process."

Key Responsibilities

As a Data Engineer at Amex GBT, your primary responsibility is to design, build, and maintain the data pipelines that fuel the company's travel and expense management platforms. You will work daily with massive datasets, extracting data from various internal systems and third-party travel vendors, transforming it to meet business rules, and loading it into centralized data warehouses.

You will collaborate closely with product managers to understand new feature requirements and with data scientists to ensure they have the clean, structured data necessary for machine learning models. A significant part of your day will involve monitoring pipeline health, troubleshooting data discrepancies, and optimizing infrastructure to reduce processing times and cloud costs.

In addition to building new features, you will drive initiatives to modernize legacy data systems. This includes migrating on-premise workloads to cloud environments and implementing automated data quality frameworks. You are expected to be a guardian of data integrity, ensuring that the financial and travel data processed by your pipelines is accurate, secure, and compliant with global regulations.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be a highly competitive candidate for this role, you need a blend of strong programming skills, architectural knowledge, and business acumen. Amex GBT looks for engineers who can operate independently while aligning with broader team goals.

• Must-have skills – Advanced proficiency in SQL and Python. Deep understanding of relational databases and data warehousing concepts. Hands-on experience building and orchestrating ETL/ELT pipelines using tools like Airflow.
• Experience level – Typically 3+ years of dedicated data engineering experience. A proven track record of deploying data solutions in production environments and managing large-scale datasets.
• Cloud expertise – Strong working knowledge of at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift).
• Soft skills – Excellent problem-solving capabilities, clear communication skills for cross-functional collaboration, and the resilience to navigate complex, enterprise-level organizational structures.
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with big data processing frameworks like Apache Spark. Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and domain knowledge in the travel or financial services sectors.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult are the interviews, and how much should I prepare? The technical difficulty is moderate, focusing heavily on practical application rather than obscure algorithmic puzzles. You should spend significant time reviewing your own resume and preparing to discuss your past projects in deep technical detail. Ensure your SQL and Python data manipulation skills are sharp.

Q: What is the typical timeline from the initial screen to an offer? The timeline can vary significantly. While the interview rounds (often a "super day") happen quickly once scheduled, initial recruiter outreach and post-interview decisions can sometimes take weeks. Be prepared for potential administrative delays.

Q: What differentiates a successful candidate for this role? Successful candidates do more than just write code; they understand the business context of their data. Being able to explain why a pipeline was built and how it saved money or improved reporting will set you apart from candidates who only focus on the technical implementation.

Q: What is the company culture and work-life balance like for Data Engineers? Amex GBT is generally known for offering a strong work-life balance. The culture is collaborative and professional, reflecting its enterprise nature. While there are crunch periods during major product launches or migrations, the day-to-day environment is stable and supportive.

Q: Will I be asked complex system design questions? You will be asked data architecture questions, which are a specialized subset of system design. Focus on data flow, storage trade-offs, ETL/ELT patterns, and data modeling rather than designing low-latency consumer web applications.

Other General Tips

• Master Your Resume: Interviewers at Amex GBT will ask highly specific questions about the projects you list. Be prepared to discuss the architecture, the challenges, and the business impact of every bullet point on your resume.
• Pace Yourself for the Super Day: Facing multiple interviews on the same day is exhausting. Practice answering questions concisely to conserve energy, and do not hesitate to ask for a quick water break between sessions if needed.

• Think Out Loud: During coding and architecture rounds, your thought process is just as important as the final answer. Communicate your assumptions, ask clarifying questions, and explain your trade-offs before writing code.
• Stay Engaged with Your Recruiter: If communication goes quiet after your interviews or after submitting documents, follow up professionally. Enterprise hiring processes can sometimes stall due to internal approvals or temporary freezes; proactive communication shows continued interest.
• Focus on Data Quality: Always incorporate data validation and error handling into your technical answers. Demonstrating that you care about data integrity will resonate strongly with a company handling financial and travel transactions.

The compensation data above provides a baseline expectation for the Data Engineer role at Amex GBT. Keep in mind that actual offers will vary based on your specific location, years of experience, and performance during the interview process. Use this information to anchor your salary expectations and negotiate confidently when the time comes.

Summary & Next Steps

Securing a Data Engineer role at American Express Global Business Travel is a fantastic opportunity to work with massive, globally impactful datasets. You will be building the infrastructure that powers enterprise travel management, requiring a rigorous approach to data quality, scalable architecture, and cross-functional collaboration. The work is complex, rewarding, and highly visible within the organization.

To succeed, focus your preparation on mastering practical SQL and Python, deeply understanding your past projects, and refining your ability to design robust data pipelines. The interview process will test your endurance and your ability to communicate technical concepts clearly. Approach your preparation methodically, ensuring you can articulate both the technical details and the business value of your work.

You have the skills and the foundational knowledge required to excel in this process. Continue to practice your coding, refine your project narratives, and explore additional interview insights and resources on Dataford to polish your performance. Approach your interview day with confidence, clarity, and a readiness to showcase your impact.