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Analytics Architecture and Reporting Questions

Designing and operating end to end analytics and reporting platforms that translate business requirements into reliable and actionable insights. This includes defining metrics and key performance indicators for different audiences, instrumentation and event design for accurate measurement, data ingestion and transformation pipelines, and data warehouse and storage architecture choices. Candidates should be able to discuss data modeling for analytics including semantic layers and data marts, approaches to ensure metric consistency across tools such as a single source of truth or metric registry, and trade offs between query performance and freshness including batch versus streaming approaches. The topic also covers dashboard architecture and visualization best practices, precomputation and aggregation strategies for performance, self service analytics enablement and adoption, support for ad hoc analysis and real time reporting, plus access controls, data governance, monitoring, data quality controls, and operational practices for scaling, maintainability, and incident detection and resolution. Interviewers will probe end to end implementations, how monitoring and quality controls were applied, and how stakeholder needs were balanced with platform constraints.

HardTechnical
0 practiced
For very large-scale analytics with frequent ad-hoc queries and high-cardinality dimensions, analyze the trade-offs between a normalized star schema and a denormalized wide table approach. Consider query latency, storage costs, update complexity, cardinality explosion, and analytic flexibility.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
A Kafka connector to your warehouse dropped messages during a connector upgrade and 10% of events in the last 24 hours were lost. Describe the incident response: how you detect and confirm data loss, stop further damage, design and run a backfill, verify correctness, and implement measures to prevent recurrence.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Your organization decides to change the definition of 'active user' (now requiring two events instead of one). Describe a migration plan to roll out this change with minimal disruption: analysis, dual-running definitions, backfill strategy, communicating to stakeholders, and how to version and document the change in the metric registry.
MediumBehavioral
0 practiced
Tell me about a time you resolved a disagreement between stakeholders (e.g., Product vs Finance) about a KPI definition. If you don't have a past example, describe step-by-step how you'd approach the conflict: discovery, evidence collection, mediation, decision, and follow-up. Use the STAR format if possible.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design a reconciliation framework that detects daily metric drift between the canonical metric and derived reports (e.g., dashboard vs finance extract). Explain components: data comparisons, thresholds, automatic anomaly detection, linking anomalies to lineage, triage workflow, and automated or manual backfill triggers.

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