First of all, I'm not sure what they actually want. As per JD, they want a candidate who is specialize in NLP. I think they have copied JD from somewhere else and didn't think much about it. In interview, if you talk about your experience in data science or NLP, interviewer will see you as you are doing something wrong. For me, he asked do you just want to work on NLP project? After that he was looking less interested in rest of interview and was just doing timepass. I feel they actually want a person who is software developer with an expertise in Python & SQL. As a data scientist, I use Python because it has great libraries that helps me to fast process my work. But they asked me to write a code without using any of the libraries of Python. Didn't expected this behavior from a top-level person of the company.