GCP data engineer interview questions and answers
Storage, compute and BigQuery-style warehousing questions for data engineers working on Google Cloud. 46 questions with full answers, written for freshers. All topics
Read the notes: Google Cloud (GCP) Data EngineerCloud (23)
- Google Cloud Storage (and vs S3)
- Cloud Pub/Sub (and vs Kafka)
- Pub/Sub delivery, ordering and dead letters
- Dataflow autoscaling and Streaming Engine
- Dataflow vs Dataproc
- Bigtable vs BigQuery vs Spanner vs Cloud SQL
- GCS consistency and object storage behavior
- Datastream and CDC on GCP
- Dataplex and governance on GCP
- GCP IAM service accounts, Workload Identity, and pipeline security
- Cost governance in GCP: BigQuery queries and storage
- Private Google Access, VPC Service Controls, and CMEK on GCP
- Google Cloud Storage storage classes and lifecycle automation
- Google Cloud Pub/Sub ordering keys and exactly-once delivery
- Cloud Dataflow windowing and late data handling with watermarks
- Dataproc Serverless for Apache Spark batch pipelines
- Cloud Composer environment architecture and Airflow worker autoscaling
- VPC Service Controls and preventing data exfiltration in GCP
- Cloud Dataflow stateful processing and streaming autoscaling
- Workload Identity Federation for keyless CI/CD in GCP pipelines
- Pub/Sub to BigQuery direct streaming ingestion without Dataflow
- Multi-region streaming resilience with Pub/Sub and dual-region GCS
- Automated sensitive data inspection and tokenization with Cloud DLP
Snowflake, BigQuery & Databricks (23)
- BigQuery architecture: Dremel, Colossus, Jupiter
- What is a slot?
- On-demand vs capacity pricing
- Partitioning in BigQuery
- Clustering in BigQuery
- Reduce BigQuery query cost
- BigQuery streaming ingestion options
- Batch loading vs streaming cost in BigQuery
- BigQuery DML and MERGE costs
- BigQuery time travel and snapshots
- BigQuery materialized views and BI Engine
- BigQuery security: IAM, authorized views, policy tags
- External tables, BigLake and Omni
- Query execution details in BigQuery
- Denormalize or join in BigQuery?
- BigQuery quotas and limits that bite
- BigQuery and dbt or Dataform
- BigQuery physical storage and the Capacitor columnar format
- BigQuery time travel and snapshot queries
- BigQuery dataset location and data residency
- BigQuery slot reservations, editions, and capacity management
- BigQuery search indexes and accelerating log analytics
- Continuous CDC and Apache Iceberg ingestion with BigLake metastore