Cognizant
American multinational information technology services and consulting company.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Medium
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
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you had to push back on a client's unrealistic deadline.
#Communication
#Negotiation
#Stakeholder Management
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Describe a situation where you had a conflict with a team member regarding a technical decision. How did you resolve it?
#Conflict Resolution
#Collaboration
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Cognizant works heavily with legacy modernization. Tell me about a time you had to learn a completely new technology stack in a short period.
#Continuous Learning
#Agility
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Describe a time when you found a critical bug in production. What were your immediate steps?
#Incident Management
#Accountability
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
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easy
Why do you want to join Cognizant, and how do you align with our core values of client-centricity?
#Company Knowledge
#Motivation
Software Engineer
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Coding
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easy
Write a program to reverse a string without using any inbuilt functions like StringBuilder.reverse().
#Strings
#Two Pointers
Software Engineer
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Coding
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easy
Write a program to find the second highest number in an integer array.
#Arrays
#Iteration
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Given two strings, write a function to check if they are anagrams of each other.
#Strings
#Hash Table
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Find the first non-repeating character in a given string and return its index.
#Strings
#Hash Table
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Find the longest substring without repeating characters.
#Strings
#Sliding Window
#Hash Table
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Detect a cycle in a linked list.
#Linked List
#Two Pointers
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Print the left view of a Binary Tree.
#Binary Tree
#Breadth-First Search
#Depth-First Search
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Implement an LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache.
#Design
#Hash Table
#Doubly Linked List
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Merge two sorted arrays into a single sorted array without using extra space (if the first array has enough buffer at the end).
#Arrays
#Two Pointers
Software Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a microservices architecture for a retail e-commerce application. How do the services communicate?
#Microservices
#API Gateway
#Service Discovery
Software Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Explain the Saga design pattern for distributed transactions in microservices.
#Microservices
#Distributed Systems
#Transactions
Software Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a URL shortener service like Bitly.
#Scalability
#Database Design
#Hashing
Software Engineer
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System Design
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medium
How do you handle database schema migrations in a CI/CD pipeline?
#Database Management
#CI/CD
#Flyway/Liquibase
Software Engineer
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System Design
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hard
How would you design a rate limiter for a public-facing API?
#API Gateway
#Algorithms
#Scalability
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the nth highest salary from an Employee table.
#SQL Queries
#Subqueries
#Window Functions
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the internal working of a HashMap in Java 8. What happens when a collision occurs?
#Data Structures
#Java Collections
#Hashing
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
What are the new features introduced in Java 8? Write a Stream API snippet to filter a list of employees by age greater than 30.
#Java 8
#Stream API
#Lambda Expressions
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
easy
Explain the difference between @Controller and @RestController in Spring Boot.
#Spring MVC
#Annotations
#REST APIs
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you handle exceptions globally in a Spring Boot application?
#Exception Handling
#Spring AOP
#Annotations
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
easy
What is Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control (IoC)? How does Spring implement it?
#Design Patterns
#Spring Core
#IoC Container
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the Bean lifecycle in the Spring framework.
#Spring Core
#Bean Lifecycle
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Write a SQL query to fetch all employees who are also managers (using a self-join).
#SQL Queries
#Joins
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
What are the differences between clustered and non-clustered indexes in SQL?
#SQL
#Indexing
#Performance Optimization
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you secure a RESTful API? Explain JWT token-based authentication.
#REST APIs
#JWT
#Spring Security
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
easy
What is the difference between the Runnable and Callable interfaces in Java?
#Multithreading
#Concurrency
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the SOLID principles with real-world examples.
#Object-Oriented Design
#Clean Code
#SOLID
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
easy
What is the difference between @Component, @Service, and @Repository annotations in Spring?
#Spring Core
#Annotations
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of CI/CD. What tools have you used, and how do you configure a basic Jenkins pipeline?
#CI/CD
#Jenkins
#Deployment
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between HashMap and ConcurrentHashMap in Java.
#Collections
#Concurrency
Software Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How does Garbage Collection work in Java, and what are the different types of garbage collectors?
#JVM
#Memory Management
#Garbage Collection
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.