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Data Quality and Governance Questions

Covers the principles, frameworks, practices, and tooling used to ensure data is accurate, complete, timely, and trustworthy across systems and pipelines. Key areas include data quality checks and monitoring: nullness and type checks, freshness and timeliness validation, referential integrity, deduplication, outlier detection, reconciliation, and automated alerting. Includes designing service level agreements for data freshness and accuracy, data lineage and impact analysis, metadata and catalog management, data classification, access controls, and compliance policies. Encompasses operational reliability of data systems: failure handling, recovery time objectives, backup and disaster recovery strategies, data observability, and incident response for data anomalies. Candidates may be evaluated on designing end to end data quality programs, selecting metrics and tooling, defining roles and stewardship (data owner, steward, custodian), building golden-record and master-data-management strategies for record linkage and deduplication across source systems (illustrative domains include CRM and sales data, IoT telemetry, financial transactions, and event or log data, among others), and implementing automated pipelines and governance controls.

MediumTechnical
38 practiced
Implement a Python function monitor_freshness(stream_iterable, freshness_threshold_seconds) that consumes events with fields {'entity_id', 'event_time'} and maintains per-entity last-seen timestamps, returning the set of entity_ids whose data is stale (last-seen older than now - freshness_threshold_seconds). Provide an efficient in-memory implementation and explain extensions for distributed processing (sharding, external state stores).
HardTechnical
35 practiced
Implement MinHash signature generation and LSH banding in Python for deduplicating large text records (e.g., product titles). Provide functions compute_minhash(tokens, num_hashes) -> list[int] and band_signatures(signature, rows_per_band) -> list[tuple], and discuss time/space complexity and tuning trade-offs when choosing number of bands and rows.
EasyTechnical
44 practiced
What is a schema registry and why is it important for data quality in ML systems? Explain how a schema registry integrates with Kafka/CDC producers and consumers, prevents schema drift, enforces compatibility (backward/forward), and supports feature engineering and reproducibility.
EasyTechnical
40 practiced
Compare data quality checks in batch, micro-batch, and streaming pipelines. For each mode (batch, micro-batch, streaming) provide examples of checks for nullness, freshness, duplication, and schema changes, and discuss trade-offs in latency, accuracy, and compute cost.
EasyTechnical
37 practiced
Explain how a feature store contributes to data quality and governance for ML workflows. Discuss online vs offline features, point-in-time correctness, TTL/freshness guarantees, metadata (owner, description), and how the feature store can enforce feature contracts and lineage.

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