The Complete interview process includes resume screening, technical rounds on SQL, python,Excel knowldege and data pipelines and data warehouse concepts, etc system design discussions, and a final managerial/ HR round
It was an online interview, it was weird. The guy seemed sexist and my friends got the position who were guys. They asked me way more technical questions than they did them.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Cognizant in Jan 2026
Interview
This was a Returnship program- It was mentioned to me that the technical interviewer is looking for somebody with Data Engineer experience especially with Pyspark and databricks and big data analytics and Hadoop
There was no Job description shared. Just word of mouth from HR About the position need skills with pyspark and data bricks
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. How do you access an element of a set?
2. What is the difference between list, tuple, and set?
3. What is the difference between append() and extend()?
4. How do you merge two dictionaries?
5. How do you check if a string contains only alphabets and numbers (no special characters)?
6. In SQL, how do you find the second highest salary employee from a department table?
7. What is the difference between DDL and DML?
8. How do you delete a row in SQL?
9. What do you know about ETL?
10. How do you update a certain key’s value in a dictionary?
11. What is encapsulation in Python?
12. Tell me about yourself, tell me about your education and career break
And what kind of projects you recently worked on explain the projects.
A lot of focus on Job role if you are lucky to know it and questions will be asked from that
For example since this was a data engineering role
They wanted someone efficient in Pyspark, Hadoop , ETL, A cloud service (Azure/AWS) and databricks especially SQL concepts.