Top 4 Data lineage Interview Questions
Browse 4 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Data lineage. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.
A user's access to a document set is revoked. What has to happen across your RAG stack?
Revoke once in the authorisation store, then propagate to the index ACLs, every cache holding text or results, any derived summaries and embeddings, and the conversation transcripts still carrying passages. Answers already delivered cannot be recalled, so the guarantee you offer is a bounded window rather than erasure.
How would you aggregate exposure across a portfolio so that the number can still be defended a year later?
Aggregation is easy arithmetic over hard inputs, so the design work is agreeing what may be added together, storing positions bi-temporally so a figure can be rebuilt as it was known on the day, and carrying lineage from every reported number back to the transaction that produced it.
An erasure request arrives and the person's data is in backups, an event stream, a warehouse copy and a training set. What can you honestly delete?
You delete from the operational store, propagate to every derived copy you can enumerate, and for the copies you cannot rewrite you rely on crypto-shredding, keyed compaction, snapshot expiry and exclusion at the next retrain.
A figure in a regulatory return you already submitted turns out to be wrong. What happens next, and what should the system have been built to do?
You quantify the error, decide materiality, tell the supervisor and resubmit with an explained delta. Building for that means an immutable snapshot of what was submitted, a re-run that reproduces it exactly, per-line lineage back to the ledger, and completeness asserted against a declared manifest rather than assumed.