Problem Solving and Communication Approach Questions

Covers the practice of solving technical problems while clearly communicating the thought process. Includes clarifying requirements, asking targeted questions, decomposing problems into subproblems, proposing brute force and optimized approaches, stating assumptions, discussing time and space complexity and trade offs, walking through examples and edge cases, and narrating debugging and recovery when stuck. Also includes collaboration during problem solving, readiness to accept hints, and ability to explain reasoning so others can follow and learn. This area is commonly tested in coding interviews and whiteboard scenarios where the candidate's communication of reasoning and process is as important as the final solution.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design an interview exercise to evaluate a candidate's communication while solving a data engineering problem. Provide the problem statement, the expected correct approach, common incorrect approaches you would probe, and a scoring rubric that rates clarification, decomposition, narration of complexity, testing strategy, and how they accept hints.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

A nightly Spark ETL job sometimes fails with an opaque executor memory error on production but runs fine locally. Describe how you would triage the problem step-by-step, what logs and metrics you would check, what configuration or code hypotheses you would form, and how you would communicate interim status and resolution to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

You deploy a change to an ETL DAG that unintentionally changes a table schema. Design a rollback strategy that minimizes data loss, includes automated validation, describes how to notify downstream consumers, and explains whether and how to backfill or reprocess historical data.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Estimate time, cost, and risk to backfill 100 TB of historical logs into an analytics table. List clarifying questions, state assumptions (cluster size, parallelism, windowing), present two backfill approaches with quantitative trade-offs, and draft a short stakeholder-facing plan recommending one approach with timeline and rollback steps.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Design an idempotent ingestion API for upstream partners so that retries do not create duplicates. Outline the API contract, idempotency keys or deduplication keys, storage implications, retention of dedup keys, example request/response, and how you would document and communicate expectations to partner engineers.

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