Real Interview Questions

A PySpark ETL on EMR must minimize cost volatility while handling variable daily loads. What EMR setup is a strong default?

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Emr Pyspark Cost Optimization Auto Scaling

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid Asked 2× May 2026

Are you proficient in Spark fundamentals?

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Spark Pyspark Big Data

🟡 Medium Behavioral Mid Asked 1× May 2026

You need to pull 200 million rows from a source JDBC system into Databricks. The current PySpark job uses a single partition and exhausts the driver. How would you redesign the read for parallelism (choose a partitionColumn, set lowerBound/upperBound/numPartitions, handle nulls/outliers, tune fetch size) and ensure the ingest is idempotent before writing to Bronze?

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Pyspark Jdbc Databricks

🟡 Medium Coding Mid Asked 1× May 2026

In your primary skills, which languages do you use—Python, SQL, PySpark, AWS—and how would you rate yourself out of 10?

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Python Sql Pyspark Aws

🟢 Easy Behavioral Junior Asked 1× Apr 2026

Do you understand the tech stack? You have experience with Python, SQL, PySpark, and AWS. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

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Python Sql Pyspark Aws Tech Stack

🟢 Easy Conceptual Junior Asked 1× Apr 2026

Provide PySpark code to compute the acceptance rate per date based on the given table and code.

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Pyspark Dataframes Aggregation

🟡 Medium Coding Junior Asked 1× Apr 2026

Need PySpark code to compute acceptance rate per date.

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Pyspark Dataframes Aggregation

🟡 Medium Coding Junior Asked 1× Apr 2026

Give PySpark code to calculate the friend acceptance rate for each date when friend requests were sent. A request is sent if action = 'sent' and accepted if action = 'accepted'. If a request is not accepted, there is no record of it being accepted in the table. The output should only include dates where requests were sent and at least one of them was accepted (acceptance can occur on any date after the request is sent).

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Pyspark Dataframes Aggregation

🟡 Medium Coding Junior Asked 1× Apr 2026

How do you optimize Pyspark?

Pyspark Optimization

🔴 Hard System Design Asked 1× Mar 2026

What is a PySpark job?

Pyspark Spark

🟡 Medium Conceptual Asked 1× Mar 2026

What is a PySpark job?

Pyspark Spark

🟡 Medium Conceptual Asked 1× Mar 2026

What is the difference between Pandas and PySpark?

Pandas Pyspark

🟡 Medium Conceptual Asked 1× Mar 2026

What is the difference between Pandas and PySpark?

Pandas Pyspark

🟡 Medium Conceptual Asked 1× Mar 2026

How do you drop duplicate records in PySpark?

Pyspark Dataframes

🟡 Medium Coding Asked 1× Mar 2026

How do you drop duplicate records in PySpark?

Pyspark Dataframes

🟡 Medium Coding Asked 1× Mar 2026