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Analysis

Cost-Optimize a Large-Scale Spark Job for an Ad-Tech Platform

FreeVerified credential3 weeksAdvanced

Overview

What this challenge is about.

Profile a PySpark job for an ad-tech platform, find its top 3 cost drivers, and prototype fixes to earn a verifiable certificate.

The scenario

The ad-tech platform (around 140 staff) processes around 12B impressions/day; a 40 percent reduction is approximately USD 45k annual savings on this single job and a template for 6 sibling jobs.

CredentialBlockchain-anchored
ShareableLinkedIn-ready
LanguageEnglish
PaceSelf-paced

The Brief

What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.

Find and prove a 40 percent cost reduction on a 4TB nightly Spark job without breaking the 4-hour SLA.

Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate

  • Profile a real Spark job with the Spark UI and cloud-platform metrics
  • Apply standard Spark optimizations (broadcast joins, partition tuning, instance mix)
  • Build a defensible cost extrapolation from subset to full data
  • Communicate cost trade-offs to finance + engineering stakeholders

Program Fit

Where this fits in your program.

Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.

Cloud Computing for Data and ML

Master · Data Engineering

Strong alignment

This challenge maps to Cloud Computing for Data and ML at the Master level. It sharpens the same practical skills your coursework expects — but in a real industry context with actual constraints and deliverables.

Careers

Career paths this challenge builds toward

Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:

Data Engineer

Spark cost optimization on a real EMR workload is the kind of project a data engineer ships in the first quarter at any ad-tech or large-data company.

This challenge sharpens

  • spark-optimization
  • cost-engineering
  • etl-pipelines

MLOps Engineer

Profiling and cost-optimizing large compute workloads is the same skillset MLOps engineers use to tame training-cluster bills.

This challenge sharpens

  • profiling
  • cloud-services
  • benchmarking

AI Solutions Architect

Translating profiling + optimization into a finance-team-defensible recommendation is core AI solutions architect work.

This challenge sharpens

  • cost-engineering
  • cloud-services
  • spark-optimization

One more thing

You can put a credential on your CV by Friday.