Technology and Platform Selection Questions

Evaluation and justification of technologies services and platforms used to implement systems across the stack. Candidates should be able to select compute options including virtual machines containers and serverless platforms as well as orchestration and workflow engines messaging systems batch and streaming processing engines object and block storage data warehouses and other data platforms. The topic encompasses comparing managed services and self managed deployments cloud versus on premise hosting and choosing frameworks runtimes and overall stacks based on workload characteristics. Assessment focuses on weighing trade offs across cost operational overhead reliability latency and throughput scaling characteristics vendor lock in development velocity team familiarity and learning curve maturity and community support security and compliance and monitoring and debugging complexity. Candidates should demonstrate how system requirements map to service capabilities justify build versus buy decisions and managed service choices design proof of concept experiments and outline migration and rollout planning while making pragmatic choices that balance performance cost and operational risk.

HardTechnical

50 practiced

As a senior data analyst, outline how you would lead a cross-functional committee to select a replacement BI platform for the company. Include evaluation criteria, scoring model, POC plan, stakeholder roles, migration strategy, training plan, and how you'd resolve disagreements between product, finance, and security teams.

MediumTechnical

50 practiced

Explain how partitioning, clustering, and indexing in a modern cloud data warehouse affect query performance and cost. Provide practical guidelines for selecting partition keys and clustering columns for time-series business metrics and for reducing bytes scanned.

MediumTechnical

48 practiced

Your analysts run ad-hoc Python scripts that touch large datasets. Evaluate interactive notebooks on managed clusters, serverless notebooks, and scheduled batch jobs. For each option, discuss development velocity, cost predictability, reproducibility, security, and how you would govern ad-hoc compute usage.

MediumTechnical

51 practiced

Write a PostgreSQL SQL query (or explain logic) that computes per-day aggregates from a table events(event_id, user_id, event_type, ts timestamp, size_bytes int): daily distinct users, total bytes processed, average event size, and top 5 event types by count for each day. This helps estimate daily storage and query costs for provider selection.

EasyTechnical

55 practiced

You need to present a business justification to move from S3+Parquet queried with Athena to Snowflake. What business metrics, cost comparisons, performance measurements, and non-functional factors would you include to make a convincing case to finance and engineering stakeholders?

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