AWS data engineer interview questions and answers
Storage, compute, warehousing and streaming questions for data engineers working on Amazon Web Services. 48 questions with full answers, written for freshers. All topics
Read the notes: AWS Cloud Data EngineerCloud (25)
- Amazon S3 and storage classes
- AWS Glue vs Amazon EMR
- Amazon Redshift (and vs Snowflake)
- Amazon Kinesis (and vs Kafka)
- Glue Data Catalog and crawlers
- Glue job bookmarks
- Athena and query-on-lake engines
- Redshift distribution and sort keys
- S3 event-driven ingestion
- Step Functions vs Airflow (MWAA)
- IAM roles, execution policies, and least privilege for AWS data pipelines
- S3 data lake partitioning, prefix design, and small files
- Cost governance in AWS: Athena, Glue, and Redshift
- VPC Endpoints (Gateway vs Interface) and KMS for S3 data lakes
- Athena partition projection
- AWS Lake Formation permissions and cell-level security
- AWS Lambda VPC networking and private RDS access in ETL
- Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose buffering and lake ingestion
- AWS Step Functions distributed map for high-concurrency ETL
- Cross-account IAM delegation and ExternalId security in data lakes
- AWS Glue Streaming versus Managed Service for Apache Flink
- AWS PrivateLink and VPC Interface Endpoints for data exfiltration defense
- Active-active disaster recovery with S3 Cross-Region Replication
- Amazon EMR Serverless capacity pre-initialization and cost tuning
- S3 Object Lock and immutable compliance storage in data platforms
Snowflake, BigQuery & Databricks (23)
- Amazon Redshift architecture and compute nodes
- Redshift distribution styles: KEY, ALL, EVEN, AUTO
- Sort keys in Redshift: compound versus interleaved
- Loading data into Redshift with COPY from S3
- Redshift Spectrum external tables
- Data skew in Redshift slices
- Redshift Workload Management (WLM) and concurrency scaling
- Redshift RA3 nodes and managed storage
- Primary key and unique constraint enforcement in Redshift
- Redshift VACUUM and ANALYZE operations
- Column compression encodings in Redshift
- Redshift Materialized Views and incremental refresh
- Redshift Serverless versus provisioned clusters
- Unload data from Redshift to S3
- Colocated joins in Redshift
- Redshift Data Sharing across AWS accounts
- Explaining query execution plans in Redshift (EXPLAIN)
- Redshift Federated Queries to PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Aurora
- Designing multi-tenant schemas and row-level security in Redshift
- Short query acceleration and machine-learning WLM tuning
- Cross-region disaster recovery and snapshot replication for Redshift
- Resolving disk spill and commit queue contention in Redshift
- Zero-ETL integration: Aurora to Amazon Redshift