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Data Quality and Validation Questions

Covers the core concepts and hands on techniques for detecting, diagnosing, and preventing data quality problems. Topics include common data issues such as missing values, duplicates, outliers, incorrect labels, inconsistent formats, schema mismatches, referential integrity violations, and distribution or temporal drift. Candidates should be able to design and implement validation checks and data profiling queries, including schema validation, column level constraints, aggregate checks, distinct counts, null and outlier detection, and business logic tests. This topic also covers the mindset of data validation and exploration: how to approach unfamiliar datasets, validate calculations against sources, document quality rules, decide remediation strategies such as imputation quarantine or alerting, and communicate data limitations to stakeholders.

MediumTechnical
54 practiced
Write a PySpark job skeleton that enforces a given schema on a Parquet dataset of size ~1TB. Requirements: fail-fast on missing required columns, log rows that fail type coercion to a quarantine store, and produce a summary report (counts of errors per column). Show code structure and key APIs you would use.
HardSystem Design
39 practiced
Design validation steps and audit trails for a training dataset pipeline that must guarantee PII is not present. Requirements: detect and redact PII fields (emails, SSNs, names) before storage in training buckets, log redaction events with lineage, and support audits for compliance.
MediumTechnical
40 practiced
Design a set of data quality checks to add to a training pipeline to detect label leakage (features derived from the label), severe class imbalance shifts, and duplicate training examples. Explain how you'd implement each check and a threshold policy for blocking training jobs.
MediumSystem Design
42 practiced
Design validation and watermarking strategies for a streaming pipeline where event-time processing is critical and late-arriving events can be up to 24 hours late. Include how you would balance latency, completeness, and resource cost.
HardTechnical
60 practiced
Propose an algorithmic approach (and practical implementation sketch) to detect label noise at scale by modeling annotator reliability (e.g., Dawid-Skene), building an agreement graph, and using this to re-weight or relabel training examples. Discuss compute costs and incremental updates.

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