How to Answer: Data maintenance is one of the many responsibilities of a Data Engineer. In many cases, tasks related to this are fairly routine. Describe a time when you encountered a data maintenance problem that required you to deviate from your "routine".
Advice and answer examples written specifically for a Data Engineer job interview.
15. Data maintenance is one of the many responsibilities of a Data Engineer. In many cases, tasks related to this are fairly routine. Describe a time when you encountered a data maintenance problem that required you to deviate from your "routine".
How to Answer
Data maintenance usually occurs on a set schedule with a specified task list. With a good data maintenance strategy, these tasks tend not to change often which is a good sign - that means everything is operating as expected. Inevitably, there will be something unexpected that occurs that may throw things off and require extra attention. The interviewer would like to see that you have experience dealing with unexpected situations like these.
Written by Helen Lee on June 15th, 2018
1st Answer Example
"As routine as data maintenance may become, it's alway important to keep a close eye on all the tasks involved, including ensuring that scripts are executing successfully. One of the data maintenance tasks involved conducting an integrity check. This allowed us to ensure our systems were not corrupted. After conducting this check, I was able to locate a corrupt index that may have caused larger issues in the future. Because of this discovery, I decided to implement an additional maintenance task as a extra safety precaution to help prevent corrupt indexes from being added to our databases."
Written by Helen Lee on June 15th, 2018