Big Data Engineer Interview Questions & Answers

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Big Data Engineers develop, test, and maintain Big Data solutions for a company. Their job is to gather large amounts of data from multiple sources and ensure that downstream users can access the data quickly and efficiently. Essentially, Big Data Engineers ensure the company’s data pipelines are scalable, secure, and able to serve multiple users.

Whether you're a job seeker preparing to be interviewed for the role of Big Data Engineer or an employer preparing to interview candidates for Big Data Engineer position, these Big Data Engineer interview questions will help you prepare yourself for the job interview session.

Big Data Engineer Interview Questions

Below are a list of some skill-based Big Data Engineer interview questions.

1. Can you explain what Big Data means to you?
2. Do you have any Big Data experience? If so, please share it with us.
3. Do you prefer good data or good models? Why?
4. Will you optimize algorithms or code to make them run faster?
5. How do you approach data preparation?
6. How would you transform unstructured data into structured data?
7. Which hardware configuration is most beneficial for Hadoop jobs?
8. What happens when two users try to access the same file in the HDFS?
9. How do you recover a NameNode when it is down?
10. What do you understand by Rack Awareness in Hadoop?
11. What is the difference between “HDFS Block” and “Input Split”?
12. Explain the different modes in which Hadoop run.
13. What is a block in HDFS and what is its default size in Hadoop 1 and Hadoop 2? Can we change the block size?
14. What is  Distributed Cache in a MapReduce Framework
15. Explain JobTracker in Hadoop
16. What information is required before creating Big Data solutions for a company?
17. What Big Data systems have you created in your previous work?
18. What scripting languages are you most familiar with?
19. What are the three main characteristics of Big Data?
20. What are the different Big Data processing techniques?
21. Talk about MapReduce in Hadoop.
22. Define HDFS and YARN, and talk about their respective components.
23. What is the purpose of the JPS command in Hadoop?
24. How do you deploy Big Data solutions?
25. How is NFS different from HDFS?
26. What are the 5 Vs in Big Data?
27. Talk about the different features of Hadoop.
28. What are the Port Numbers for NameNode, Task Tracker, and Job Tracker?
29. Tell us how big data and Hadoop are related to each other.
30. How is big data analysis helpful in increasing business revenue?
31. Why is Hadoop used for Big Data Analytics?
32. What is fsck?
33. What is the Command to format the NameNode?
34. What are the different configuration files in Hadoop?
35. What is commodity hardware?
36. How can you achieve security in Hadoop?
37. How do you restart all the daemons in Hadoop?
38. What is the use of jps command in Hadoop?

Big Data Engineer Interview Questions and Answers

Every interview is different and the questions may vary. However, there are lots of general questions that get asked at every interview.

Below are some common questions you'd expect during Big Data Engineer interviews. Click on each question to see how to answer them.

1. Why Do You Want This Job?
2. What Is Your Greatest Accomplishment?
3. What is Your Greatest Strength?
4. What is Your Salary Expectation?
5. Tell Me About Yourself
6. Why Do You Want To Leave Your Current Job?
7. Are You a Leader or a Follower?
8. Do You Have Any Questions for Us?
9. What is Your Greatest Weakness?
10. Why Should We Hire You?

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