Tools·13 min read·
Apache Airflow Interview Questions: Data Orchestration Deep Dive
Everything you need to know about Airflow for data engineering interviews — DAGs, operators, scheduling, best practices, and common gotchas.
Airflow in the Modern Data Stack
Apache Airflow is the most popular data orchestration tool. If a company uses Python-based data pipelines, they almost certainly use Airflow (or a managed version like Cloud Composer or MWAA).
Expect Airflow questions in any company that values pipeline reliability and observability.
Core Concepts to Know
- DAGs, operators, and tasks
- Sensors and their use cases
- XComs for task communication
- Connections and hooks
- Executor types (Local, Celery, Kubernetes)
- Trigger rules and branching
- Backfill and catchup behavior
Advanced Topics
For senior roles:
- Dynamic DAG generation patterns
- Custom operators and plugins
- Airflow 2.x TaskFlow API
- Scaling Airflow (KubernetesExecutor, auto-scaling workers)
- Monitoring and alerting strategies
- CI/CD for DAGs
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