Data Engineering & Analytics Infrastructure Topics
Data pipeline design, ETL/ELT processes, streaming architectures, data warehousing infrastructure, analytics platform design, and real-time data processing. Covers event-driven systems, batch and streaming trade-offs, data quality and governance at scale, schema design for analytics, and infrastructure for big data processing. Distinct from Data Science & Analytics (which focuses on statistical analysis and insights) and from Cloud & Infrastructure (platform-focused rather than data-flow focused).
Autonomous Vehicle Infrastructure
Covers infrastructure and operational capabilities needed to support autonomous vehicle development, testing, and deployment. Topics include large scale sensor and telematics data collection, high throughput data pipelines, simulation and test environments, compute architectures for training and inference, edge computing considerations, hardware in the loop testing, safety telemetry and validation pipelines, regulatory and compliance constraints, and secure data management for sensitive sensor data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Architecture
Understand modern cloud data platforms: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Azure Synapse. Know their architecture, scalability models, performance characteristics, and cost optimization strategies. Discuss separation of compute and storage, time travel, and zero-copy cloning.
Data Management and System Integration
Cover enterprise approaches to organizing, storing, integrating, protecting and operating data to support business needs and system interoperability. Topics include data architecture and modeling, relational and non relational databases, data warehousing and analytics platforms, extract transform and load pipelines, master data management and data quality practices, backup and recovery strategies, and performance tuning for data services. Also describe integration patterns and technologies such as application programming interface design, messaging and event driven architectures, middleware, and approaches to consolidate or modernize siloed legacy systems. Include data governance topics such as ownership, metadata, lifecycle management, privacy considerations and how to balance availability, consistency and compliance.
Data Quality and Governance
Covers the principles, frameworks, practices, and tooling used to ensure data is accurate, complete, timely, and trustworthy across systems and pipelines. Key areas include data quality checks and monitoring such as nullness and type checks, freshness and timeliness validation, referential integrity, deduplication, outlier detection, reconciliation, and automated alerting. Includes design of service level agreements for data freshness and accuracy, data lineage and impact analysis, metadata and catalog management, data classification, access controls, and compliance policies. Encompasses operational reliability of data systems including failure handling, recovery time objectives, backup and disaster recovery strategies, observability and incident response for data anomalies. Also covers domain and system specific considerations such as customer relationship management and sales systems: common causes of data problems, prevention strategies like input validation rules, canonicalization, deduplication and training, and business impact on forecasting and operations. Candidates may be evaluated on designing end to end data quality programs, selecting metrics and tooling, defining roles and stewardship, and implementing automated pipelines and governance controls.
Data and Analytics Infrastructure
Designing building and operating end to end data and analytics platforms that collect transform store and serve event product and revenue data for reporting analysis and decision making. Core areas include event instrumentation and tag management to capture user journeys marketing attribution and experimental events; data ingestion strategies and connectors; extract transform load pipelines and streaming processing; orchestration and workflow management; and choices between batch and real time architectures. Candidates must be able to design storage and serving layers including data warehouses data lakes lakehouse patterns and managed analytical databases and to choose storage formats partitioning and indexing strategies driven by volume velocity variety and access patterns. Data modeling for analytics covers raw event layers curated semantic layers dimensional modeling and metric definitions that support business intelligence and product analytics. Governance and reliability topics include data quality validation freshness monitoring lineage metadata and cataloging schema evolution master data considerations and role based access control. Operational concerns include scaling storage processing and query concurrency fault tolerance and resiliency monitoring and observability alerting cost and performance trade offs and capacity planning. Finally candidates should be able to evaluate and select tools and frameworks for orchestration stream processing and business intelligence integrate analytics platforms with downstream consumers and explain how architecture and operational choices support marketing product and business decisions while balancing tooling investment and team skills.