Kafka Interview Questions for Data Engineers

All Kafka questions

Kafka interview questions
#	Question	Difficulty	Type
1	Consumer lag keeps growing. How do you diagnose and fix it?	Medium	debugging, scenario
2	Explain Kafka partitions and consumer groups.	Medium	conceptual, architecture
3	How do acks, replication factor and min.insync.replicas decide Kafka durability?	Medium	conceptual, scenario
4	How do you choose retention and size disk for a Kafka topic?	Medium	architecture, scenario
5	How do you choose the number of partitions for a Kafka topic?	Medium	architecture, scenario
6	How do you evolve Kafka message schemas safely with a Schema Registry?	Medium	conceptual, scenario
7	How do you handle poison messages and dead-letter topics in Kafka?	Medium	scenario, debugging
8	How does Kafka guarantee message ordering, and where can ordering break?	Medium	conceptual, scenario
9	Kafka vs Kinesis vs a message queue: how do you choose?	Medium	architecture, conceptual
10	What causes consumer group rebalances, and how do you reduce their impact?	Medium	debugging, conceptual
11	What is at-least-once delivery and what problems can it create?	Medium	conceptual, scenario
12	What is Kafka log compaction, and when would you use it?	Medium	conceptual, scenario
13	How would you stream database changes into Kafka with Debezium?	Hard	architecture, scenario
14	What does exactly-once mean in Kafka, and how is it achieved?	Hard	conceptual, architecture

Ticks are saved in this browser only. No account needed.