Cognitiv Machine Learning Engineer interview questions

The coding problem I got asked was: Create a function that goes from one word to another word changing one letter at a time where each word in-between must exist in a dictionary and returns the shortest number of steps to do this. I found the solution to this on GeeksForGeeks but still don't know how anyone would solve it, especially in like 20 minutes while someone is watching you code. SQL questions were straight-forward. I got some definition questions about 'many-to-one' and 'one-to-many' relationships. Other than that, just writing queries to join and aggregate different tables. Other than that, mainly just behavioral questions, with one big data pipeline hypothetical question about how I would solve the problem they face.