Airflow & DAGs interview questions for data engineers
Orchestration, DAG design, operators, sensors, XCom, and how failures get handled. 32 questions with full answers, written for freshers. All topics
Airflow 3 (5)
Scheduling Deep Dive (9)
Operating Airflow in Production (18)
- Task stuck in queued
- DAG not showing in the UI
- DAG succeeded but the data is wrong
- Which failures should be retried?
- Callbacks and alerting
- Variables vs Connections vs XCom
- Secrets backends
- Running heavy work: Airflow is not the compute engine
- KubernetesPodOperator
- Setup and teardown tasks
- CI/CD for DAGs
- Backfill without hurting production
- Airflow vs other orchestrators
- Trigger rules for cleanup and partial failure
- Scheduler performance tuning
- Metadata DB maintenance
- Task groups and labels for readable DAGs
- Cloud Composer specifics