Data Engineer Interview Guide
Technical Round: Big Data & PySpark Core Concepts
Explain Spark's Execution Model (Driver, Executors, DAG)
- **Driver**: The central component that creates the SparkContext and manages task
scheduling.
- **Executors**: Distributed workers responsible for executing tasks and storing computed
data.
- **DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph)**: A sequence of computation stages representing task
dependencies in Spark.
Follow-up Questions & Answers
- **How does Spark handle task failures in an executor?**
- Spark retries failed tasks up to a configured limit (`spark.task.maxFailures`). If a task fails
too many times, the stage fails.
- **What happens when the driver node crashes?**
- The Spark job stops immediately, as the driver manages the execution plan.
Explain RDD, DataFrame, and Dataset Differences
- **RDD (Resilient Distributed Dataset):** Low-level API for distributed data processing,
lacks optimization features.
- **DataFrame:** Optimized API using Catalyst optimizer, supports SQL-like queries, and is
memory-efficient.
- **Dataset:** Type-safe, object-oriented API, combines RDD performance with DataFrame
optimizations.
Hands-on PySpark Coding Challenge
Problem: Process a Large Dataset Efficiently in PySpark and AWS S3
Optimized Solution:
```python
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
spark =
SparkSession.builder.appName("OptimizedJob").enableHiveSupport().getOrCreate()
df = spark.read.parquet("s3://bucket/transactions/")
high_value_txns = df.filter(df["amount"] > 100000)
customer_df = spark.sql("SELECT * FROM customer_data")
joined_df = high_value_txns.join(customer_df, "customer_id", "inner")
joined_df.write.mode("overwrite").partitionBy("region").parquet("s3://bucket/output/")
spark.stop()
```
Follow-up Questions & Answers
- **Why did we use partitioning?**
- It reduces query scan time by enabling **partition pruning**.
- **How can you optimize broadcast joins in Spark?**
- Use `broadcast()` from `pyspark.sql.functions`, ensuring smaller tables fit into memory.
- **What happens if the dataset size increases to 50TB?**
- Optimize with **better partitioning, EMR autoscaling, and efficient file formats** like
ORC.
Scenario-Based & Problem-Solving Round
Scenario 1: Optimizing a Data Pipeline
- **Problem:** Your daily batch pipeline takes too long to complete. How do you optimize it?
- **Solution:**
1. Profile execution using Spark UI to find bottlenecks.
2. Optimize shuffle operations by using **broadcast joins and repartitioning** wisely.
3. Use **Parquet** instead of CSV to reduce I/O overhead.
4. Implement **incremental processing** instead of full dataset reprocessing.
5. Use **Delta Lake** for ACID compliance and efficient data handling.
Scenario 2: Real-Time Streaming with Kafka & Spark
- **Problem:** You need to process real-time stock market data with Spark and Kafka.
- **Solution:**
- Read Kafka streams using `spark.readStream.format("kafka")`.
- Deserialize JSON messages using Spark's built-in functions.
- Apply **windowing and watermarking** for handling late-arriving data.
- Store aggregated results in **HBase or Cassandra** for fast lookups.
Key Definitions
Important Terms
- **DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph):** Spark's computation model for executing jobs.
- **RDD (Resilient Distributed Dataset):** Immutable distributed collection of objects in
Spark.
- **Parquet:** A columnar storage format optimized for analytical queries.
- **Broadcast Join:** Optimized join strategy for small tables.
- **Shuffle:** Data transfer between partitions, often a performance bottleneck.
- **Executor:** Worker node in Spark that runs tasks.
- **Coalesce vs. Repartition:** Coalesce reduces partitions without shuffling; repartition
evenly distributes data.
