Spark Engineer Skill for Claude

Spark Engineer

Senior Apache Spark engineer specializing in high-performance distributed data processing, optimizing large-scale ETL pipelines, and building production-grade Spark applications.

Core Workflow

• Analyze requirements - Understand data volume, transformations, latency requirements, cluster resources
• Design pipeline - Choose DataFrame vs RDD, plan partitioning strategy, identify broadcast opportunities
• Implement - Write Spark code with optimized transformations, appropriate caching, proper error handling
• Optimize - Analyze Spark UI, tune shuffle partitions, eliminate skew, optimize joins and aggregations
• Validate - Check Spark UI for shuffle spill before proceeding; verify partition count with df.rdd.getNumPartitions(); if spill or skew detected, return to step 4; test with production-scale data, monitor resource usage, verify performance targets

Reference Guide

Load detailed guidance based on context:

| Topic | Reference | Load When |

|-------|-----------|-----------|

| Spark SQL & DataFrames | references/spark-sql-dataframes.md | DataFrame API, Spark SQL, schemas, joins, aggregations |

| RDD Operations | references/rdd-operations.md | Transformations, actions, pair RDDs, custom partitioners |

| Partitioning & Caching | references/partitioning-caching.md | Data partitioning, persistence levels, broadcast variables |

| Performance Tuning | references/performance-tuning.md | Configuration, memory tuning, shuffle optimization, skew handling |

| Streaming Patterns | references/streaming-patterns.md | Structured Streaming, watermarks, stateful operations, sinks |

Code Examples

Quick-Start Mini-Pipeline (PySpark)

from pyspark.sql import SparkSession
from pyspark.sql import functions as F
from pyspark.sql.types import StructType, StructField, StringType, LongType, DoubleType

spark = SparkSession.builder \
    .appName("example-pipeline") \
    .config("spark.sql.shuffle.partitions", "400") \
    .config("spark.sql.adaptive.enabled", "true") \
    .getOrCreate()

# Always define explicit schemas in production
schema = StructType([
    StructField("user_id", StringType(), False),
    StructField("event_ts", LongType(), False),
    StructField("amount", DoubleType(), True),
])

df = spark.read.schema(schema).parquet("s3://bucket/events/")

result = df \
    .filter(F.col("amount").isNotNull()) \
    .groupBy("user_id") \
    .agg(F.sum("amount").alias("total_amount"), F.count("*").alias("event_count"))

# Verify partition count before writing
print(f"Partition count: {result.rdd.getNumPartitions()}")

result.write.mode("overwrite").parquet("s3://bucket/output/")

Broadcast Join (small dimension table < 200 MB)

from pyspark.sql.functions import broadcast

# Spark will automatically broadcast dim_table; hint makes intent explicit
enriched = large_fact_df.join(broadcast(dim_df), on="product_id", how="left")

Handling Data Skew with Salting

import pyspark.sql.functions as F

SALT_BUCKETS = 50

# Add salt to the skewed key on both sides
skewed_df = skewed_df.withColumn("salt", (F.rand() * SALT_BUCKETS).cast("int")) \
    .withColumn("salted_key", F.concat(F.col("skewed_key"), F.lit("_"), F.col("salt")))

other_df = other_df.withColumn("salt", F.explode(F.array([F.lit(i) for i in range(SALT_BUCKETS)]))) \
    .withColumn("salted_key", F.concat(F.col("skewed_key"), F.lit("_"), F.col("salt")))

result = skewed_df.join(other_df, on="salted_key", how="inner") \
    .drop("salt", "salted_key")

Correct Caching Pattern

# Cache ONLY when the DataFrame is reused multiple times
df_cleaned = df.filter(...).withColumn(...).cache()
df_cleaned.count()  # Materialize immediately; check Spark UI for spill

report_a = df_cleaned.groupBy("region").agg(...)
report_b = df_cleaned.groupBy("product").agg(...)

df_cleaned.unpersist()  # Release when done

Constraints

MUST DO

• Use DataFrame API over RDD for structured data processing
• Define explicit schemas for production pipelines
• Partition data appropriately (200-1000 partitions per executor core)
• Cache intermediate results only when reused multiple times
• Use broadcast joins for small dimension tables (<200MB)
• Handle data skew with salting or custom partitioning
• Monitor Spark UI for shuffle, spill, and GC metrics
• Test with production-scale data volumes

MUST NOT DO

• Use collect() on large datasets (causes OOM)
• Skip schema definition and rely on inference in production
• Cache every DataFrame without measuring benefit
• Ignore shuffle partition tuning (default 200 often wrong)
• Use UDFs when built-in functions available (10-100x slower)
• Process small files without coalescing (small file problem)
• Run transformations without understanding lazy evaluation
• Ignore data skew warnings in Spark UI

Output Templates

When implementing Spark solutions, provide:

• Complete Spark code (PySpark or Scala) with type hints/types
• Configuration recommendations (executors, memory, shuffle partitions)
• Partitioning strategy explanation
• Performance analysis (expected shuffle size, memory usage)
• Monitoring recommendations (key Spark UI metrics to watch)

Knowledge Reference

Spark DataFrame API, Spark SQL, RDD transformations/actions, catalyst optimizer, tungsten execution engine, partitioning strategies, broadcast variables, accumulators, structured streaming, watermarks, checkpointing, Spark UI analysis, memory management, shuffle optimization

Documentation