Real Interview Questions

These are technology stack questions. I'm asking: When storing data, which format do you choose? In Snowflake, you can store data in native Snowflake format or Iceberg. In Databricks, you can store data in Delta Lake or Iceberg. Which format would you pick and why?

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Snowflake Databricks Delta Lake Iceberg Data Storage Formats

🟡 Medium Conceptual Junior 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler Asked 1× Jul 2026

Shubhi, the question is simple: When a modeler is giving a proposal to someone, should they structure the table and approach with technical rationale? Which platform are you using? In Databricks, if you are giving someone a model that works on finance data and the requirement is to maintain history, from an implementation point of view, what is the underlying architecture of Databricks?

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Databricks Data Modeling Data Warehousing History Maintenance

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler Asked 1× Jul 2026

We are talking about a Databricks pipeline. Which pipeline did you develop, and which database did you use?

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Databricks Data Pipeline Database

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler Asked 1× Jul 2026

Say you have ingestion pipelines; what are you primarily using? Are you using Databricks or Snowflake? Was the whole platform considered?

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Data Pipelines Databricks Snowflake

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler 🏢 capgemini Asked 1× Jul 2026

Are you familiar with Databricks?

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Databricks Data Engineering

🟢 Easy Conceptual Fresher 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler 🏢 capgemini Asked 1× Jul 2026

Do you schedule end‑to‑end flows in Databricks, for example ingesting data through an API, performing cleansing and transformations all the way to the core layer? Are these runs scheduled to execute daily or at specific intervals? If failures occur, how do you receive notifications and troubleshoot the issue?

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Databricks Etl Scheduling Job Monitoring Failure Handling Data Pipeline

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler 🏢 capgemini Asked 1× Jul 2026

Earlier we discussed the silver layer, where we mainly write data cleansing logic using PySpark. I'm curious: would you still use Databricks notebooks and PySpark commands to create the gold layer? Are you familiar with dbt and can you execute dbt using traditional SQL templates?

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Silver Layer Gold Layer Pyspark Databricks Dbt Sql

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler 🏢 capgemini Asked 1× Jul 2026

Do you normally deploy dbt code/models from one environment to another? For example, working in a dev instance of Databricks and then moving to production. How do you manage environment variables, connections, and passwords to keep them secure and easy to manage?

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Dbt Databricks Devops Environment Variables Security

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer/ Data Modeler 🏢 capgemini Asked 1× Jul 2026

If we want to move dashboards to Tableau, how should we handle transformation logic that currently resides in Remio, and how would we adjust the ingestion pipeline to load data into the raw zone in Databricks?

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Databricks Remio Tableau Data Pipeline

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer Asked 1× Jul 2026

Can you explain some use cases you have recently handled in PySpark on Databricks?

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Pyspark Databricks Use Cases

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer 🏢 cognizant Asked 1× Jul 2026

Between Python and PySpark on Databricks, which is more professional? If you had to choose a primary skill set, what would you pick?

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Python Pyspark Databricks Data Engineering

🟡 Medium Conceptual Mid 👤 Data Engineer 🏢 cognizant Asked 1× Jul 2026

Will using a broadcast join resolve the scenario, and can you provide the syntax for it?

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Pyspark Databricks Syntax

🟡 Medium Conceptual Junior 👤 Data Engineer 🏢 cognizant Asked 1× Jul 2026

What options are available in PySpark on Databricks to handle scenarios involving large datasets and joins?

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Pyspark Databricks Data Processing

🟡 Medium Conceptual Junior 👤 Data Engineer 🏢 cognizant Asked 1× Jul 2026

What are the different ways available in PySpark on Databricks to handle large data ingestion scenarios, and is there a particular approach that is recommended?

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Pyspark Databricks Data Processing

🟡 Medium Conceptual Junior 👤 Data Engineer 🏢 cognizant Asked 1× Jul 2026

Is Azure Data Factory different from Azure Databricks?

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Azure Data Factory Azure Databricks Data Integration

🟢 Easy Conceptual Fresher 👤 Data Engineering Asked 1× Jul 2026

Why use a DLT pipeline?

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Dlt Databricks Data Engineering

🟢 Easy Conceptual Fresher 👤 Data Engineering Asked 1× Jun 2026

What is Unity Catalog and why use it?

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Unity Catalog Databricks Data Governance

🟢 Easy Conceptual Fresher 👤 Data Engineering Asked 1× Jun 2026

What is the difference between a normal ATL pipeline and a DLT pipeline?

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Data Engineering Databricks Dlt Etl

🟡 Medium Conceptual Junior 👤 Data Engineering Asked 1× Jun 2026

Did you use the auto loader option in Databricks?

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Databricks Auto Loader Data Engineering

🟢 Easy Behavioral Junior 👤 Data Engineering Asked 1× Jun 2026

You are orchestrating a 5‑task lakehouse workflow where Task A discovers a partition path (e.g., s3://raw/yyyyymmdd=20231015) that downstream tasks must use. Finance wants ephemeral, policy‑restricted compute and parallel fan‑out where possible. Which Databricks pattern best fits?

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Databricks Lakehouse Workflow Job Clusters

🟡 Medium Conceptual Junior 👤 Aws Data Engineer Asked 1× May 2026