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Airflow / Scheduling Interview Questions 2026

Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026

6 Airflow / Scheduling interview questions from General, Deloitte, Grab and more. Real questions from Technical, System Design, and HR rounds.

6 questions
Companies: General, Deloitte, Grab

All Airflow / Scheduling Questions

General Medium Scenario round 2-5 years

Explain backfill in Airflow. Your daily pipeline is new. You need to process data for the last 30 days. How?

↑ 22 upvotes · 50 engineers asked this · SDE2
General Medium Screening round 2-5 years

What is an Airflow XCom? What are its limitations for large data?

↑ 21 upvotes · 49 engineers asked this · SDE2
General Medium Screening round 3-6 years

How do you handle secrets in Airflow? What are the risks of storing them in the DAG file or UI Variables?

↑ 20 upvotes · 48 engineers asked this · SDE2
Grab Medium Technical round 2-6 yearsAirflow

Your Airflow DAG needs to process each day's ride data only after all regional data files for that day have landed, but files can arrive up to 6 hours late from some regions. How would you design the trigger logic?

↑ 20 upvotes · 11 engineers asked this · Data Engineer
General Hard Screening round 3-6 years

Explain Airflow's execution_date vs scheduled_interval. A DAG scheduled daily at midnight runs at 1am. What is the execution_date?

↑ 19 upvotes · 47 engineers asked this · SDE2
Deloitte Medium Technical round 2-6 yearsAirflow

A single Airflow DAG has grown to 40 tasks and is hard to reason about or debug. What signs indicate it should be split into multiple DAGs, and how would you handle dependencies between them?

↑ 18 upvotes · 9 engineers asked this · Data Engineer

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Same topic at specific companies

General Airflow / Scheduling Deloitte Airflow / Scheduling Grab Airflow / Scheduling

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Frequently asked questions

Explain backfill in Airflow. Your daily pipeline is new. You need to process data for the last 30 days. How?
Explain backfill in Airflow. Your daily pipeline is new. You need to process data for the last 30 days. How?
What is an Airflow XCom? What are its limitations for large data?
What is an Airflow XCom? What are its limitations for large data?
How do you handle secrets in Airflow? What are the risks of storing them in the DAG file or UI Variables?
How do you handle secrets in Airflow? What are the risks of storing them in the DAG file or UI Variables?
Your Airflow DAG needs to process each day's ride data only after all regional data files for that day have landed, but files can arrive up to 6 hours late from some regions. How would you design the trigger logic?
Your Airflow DAG needs to process each day's ride data only after all regional data files for that day have landed, but files can arrive up to 6 hours late from some regions. How would you design the trigger logic?
Explain Airflow's execution_date vs scheduled_interval. A DAG scheduled daily at midnight runs at 1am. What is the execution_date?
Explain Airflow's execution_date vs scheduled_interval. A DAG scheduled daily at midnight runs at 1am. What is the execution_date?