Capgemini

Global leader in partnering with companies to transform and manage their business by harnessing the power of technology.

4 Rounds ~21 Days Medium

Start Mock Interview

The Interview Loop

Recruiter Screen (30 min)

Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.

Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)

Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.

Interview Question Bank

All Roles Backend Engineer 35 Cloud Engineer 35 Data Engineer 35 Data Scientist 35 DevOps Engineer 35 Frontend Engineer 35 Full Stack Engineer 35 Machine Learning Engineer 35 Product Manager 35 Software Engineer 35

All Topics Big Data 10 SQL 5 Cloud 4 Culture Fit 3 System Design 3 Python 3 Data Modeling 2 Leadership 2

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex technical data pipeline issue to a non-technical client stakeholder.

#Communication #Consulting

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Describe a situation at a previous client where you had a very tight deadline for a data migration project. How did you prioritize your tasks?

#Time Management #Agile

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

How do you handle changing data requirements from a client midway through an Agile sprint?

#Agile #Adaptability #Client Management

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • hard

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior architect's design choice for a data pipeline. How did you resolve the disagreement?

#Conflict Resolution #Technical Leadership

Practice

Data Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Describe a time you proactively identified a performance bottleneck in a production data pipeline and fixed it without being asked.

#Proactivity #Problem Solving

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a SQL query to find the nth highest salary for each department from an Employee table.

#Window Functions #DENSE_RANK #CTEs

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • hard

Write a SQL query to identify users who have logged in for 3 or more consecutive days.

#Advanced SQL #Self Joins #LEAD/LAG #Date Functions

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a SQL MERGE statement to implement Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) Type 2 logic for a customer dimension table.

#Data Warehousing #SCD Type 2 #MERGE Statement

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a PySpark script to read a CSV file, drop rows with nulls in a specific column, and write the output to Parquet partitioned by a date column.

#PySpark #DataFrames #I/O Operations

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • hard

Write PySpark code to flatten a deeply nested JSON schema into a flat tabular DataFrame.

#PySpark #Complex Data Types #JSON

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Given a PySpark DataFrame, how do you find the second most frequent item in a specific column?

#PySpark #Aggregations #Window Functions

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • easy

Write a Python function to check if a given string is a valid palindrome, ignoring spaces, case, and special characters.

#Python #String Manipulation

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a Python script to merge multiple large CSV files efficiently without loading them entirely into memory.

#Python #File I/O #Memory Management

Practice

Data Engineer • Coding • medium

Implement a Python function to find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

#Python #Sliding Window

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • medium

Design a data model for a retail client migrating their legacy on-premise data warehouse to Snowflake.

#Data Modeling #Snowflake #Cloud Migration

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • medium

How would you implement Change Data Capture (CDC) in a modern cloud data stack?

#CDC #Data Architecture #Streaming

Practice

Data Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a real-time streaming pipeline for IoT sensor data using Azure services.

#Azure #Streaming #IoT #Architecture

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

Explain the exact differences between RANK(), DENSE_RANK(), and ROW_NUMBER() with a practical example.

#Window Functions #Data Ranking

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

You have a slow-running SQL query with multiple joins on large tables. Walk me through your step-by-step approach to optimize it.

#Performance Tuning #Execution Plans #Indexing

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • hard

How does Apache Spark handle data skewness? Explain techniques like salting.

#PySpark #Performance Optimization #Data Skew

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

What is the difference between narrow and wide transformations in Spark? Give examples of each.

#PySpark #Spark Architecture #Transformations

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain Broadcast Hash Join and Sort Merge Join in Spark. When would you use one over the other?

#PySpark #Joins #Optimization

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you manage memory in PySpark? Explain the difference between cache() and persist().

#PySpark #Memory Management

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • hard

Explain the Catalyst Optimizer in Spark. What are its main phases?

#Spark Architecture #Catalyst Optimizer

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you handle the 'small files problem' in Spark and HDFS/Cloud Storage?

#PySpark #Storage Optimization

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

What is the difference between repartition() and coalesce() in PySpark?

#PySpark #Partitioning

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

Explain the differences between a Star Schema and a Snowflake Schema. What are the pros and cons of each?

#Data Warehousing #Dimensional Modeling

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

What are Slowly Changing Dimensions? Explain Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3 with examples.

#Data Warehousing #SCD

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you pass parameters dynamically between activities and pipelines in Azure Data Factory (ADF)?

#Azure Data Factory #Pipeline Orchestration

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the architecture of Databricks. What is the difference between the control plane and the data plane?

#Databricks #Cloud Architecture

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • easy

How do you handle pipeline failures, retries, and alerting in Azure Data Factory?

#Azure Data Factory #Error Handling

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Describe the Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) commonly used in Databricks.

#Databricks #Data Lakehouse #Medallion Architecture

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you secure data at rest and in transit in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2?

#Azure #Data Security

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain generators and decorators in Python. Provide a practical use case for a data engineering pipeline.

#Python #Advanced Python

Practice

Data Engineer • Technical • hard

What is the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) in Python, and how does it affect multithreading in data processing tasks?

#Python #Concurrency

Practice

Difficulty Radar

Based on recent AI-sourced data.

Meet Your Interviewers

The "Standard" Interviewer

Senior Engineer

Focuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.

Simulate

Unwritten Rules

Think Out Loud

Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.

Practice Now