Proton.ai interview questions

How would you rate your current manager on a scale of 1-10? What is your superpower? Why did you leave X company?

🔹 Technical Rounds Python & Data Handling 1. How would you read and process an 8 GB text file in Python without running out of memory? Pipeline Design & Reliability 2. Imagine your pipeline ingests hundreds of CSVs daily from multiple sources. Some arrive late or incomplete — how would you design the pipeline to handle missing/delayed files? 3. Why use Redis checkpointing instead of relying only on Airflow states? 4. What if some files (e.g., products) are missing but others (e.g., orders) arrive — would you still process? 5. What if a file never arrives — how would you handle it? 6. If a late file arrives and the source team asks you to reprocess, how would you re-run the DAG? 7. Are you using Airflow sensors or schedules? How do you pick up files reliably? APIs & Real-Time 8. If an API experiences downtime, timeouts, or rate limits, how would you design the pipeline to handle it gracefully? 9. Imagine an e-commerce system with 100K products from multiple vendors, prices coming from APIs — how would you design an optimal, resilient system? 10. Would you call APIs on every page load? If not, where would you store and serve the data? Batch Processing & Optimization 11. Suppose your batch job processing large volumes overnight is too slow — what optimizations would you apply? 12. If the processing is optimized but storage writes are still slow, what would you check/optimize? 13. If instead of Parquet files you had to store in SQL or Elasticsearch, how would you optimize writes? 14. You mentioned indexing — how does indexing affect database writes? SQL 15. Write a query: Rank sales reps by total sales per region per month using RANK() and GROUP BY. ⸻ 🔹 Final Round (Behavioral / Leadership) 16. Tell us your life story starting from high school. 17. What kind of student were you? Which classes did you enjoy or dislike? 18. Back in high school, if we asked what you wanted to become, what would you have said? 19. You played cricket — did you play only casually or for your school? 20. Was choosing your university a deliberate choice? Why that one? 21. How did you do in the entrance exam and what was your thought process in choosing engineering? 22. Apart from studying, what else was going on in your life during college? 23. Who was your first manager? If we call him, what would he say is your superpower? 24. Same question for Gopi (healthcare project manager) — what feedback would he give about you? 25. From all the projects you’ve done, which one are you the most proud of where you had maximum ownership? 26. Why are you looking to leave Newfold / Aeries and what are you looking for next?