Kafka interview questions for data engineers
Topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets, Connect, and streaming basics. 47 questions with full answers, written for freshers. All topics
Core Concepts (7)
Producers & Consumers (6)
Advanced Kafka (4)
Extra High-Value (1)
Internals (14)
- Why Kafka is fast
- High watermark and log end offset
- min.insync.replicas with acks=all
- Unclean leader election
- Segments and retention
- The __consumer_offsets topic
- Group coordinator and partition assignment
- What changed in Kafka 4.0
- Share groups (Queues for Kafka)
- Choosing the number of partitions
- Ordering across a whole topic
- Producer batching and compression
- Producer retries and delivery.timeout.ms
- Transactions and zombie fencing
Operations & Scenarios (15)
- Consumer lag keeps growing
- Duplicate messages downstream
- Dead letter topics
- Rebalance storms
- Manual vs auto offset commit
- Resetting offsets to replay data
- Kafka security basics
- MirrorMaker 2 and geo-replication
- Tiered storage
- Record headers
- Stream-table duality
- Kafka for CDC with Debezium
- Avro vs Protobuf vs JSON Schema in Kafka
- Design a topic for order events
- Monitoring Kafka