American Express Data Engineer Interview Questions

Why do you want to join American Express?

Create a Python program to demonstrate the use of set operations (union, intersection).

Describe Spark's memory management model. How do you handle heap memory overhead issues?

Implement a recursive query for hierarchy (employee-manager). Explain the termination guarantees, depth limits, and when a recursive CTE becomes a scalability bottleneck. What alternatives exist for graph-scale hierarchies in Spark or a data lake?

Given a table of sales data, use window functions to calculate a running total.

How would you optimize a query with multiple joins and subqueries?

Code a simple PySpark job to read a JSON file, filter records, and write output in Parquet format.