I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Databricks in Mar 2023
Interview
I was contacted by recruiter and he arranged the first coding round with an engineer. Interviewer gave a one sentence description of a super simple problem and did not make any attempt to clarify. I assumed that he/she is being intentionally vague, so that I ask questions. When I asked some clarifying questions, he/she just said that its implementation detail and the requirement is already clear. I started writing some code with my assumptions and wrote a solution, but did not get any feedback whether I am going in the right or wrong direction. To my surprise, I was then asked to copy the same functionality twice and was asked to fix the compilation errors and run the code. After first run, the output was not correct. I found the bug and started fixing it, but was told that they have a hard stop and need to go. I explained the bug and how will I fix it, and wrap up the interview. I have been on both sides of the interview table multiple times and never had such a weird experience. It may sound like sour grapes, but Databricks interviewers could use some training. PS- Apparently there is a one year cooling period and I can't interview there for another year.
The Databricks interview is notoriously tough and they absolutely live up to that reputation. The process moved quickly but the technical bar is incredibly high. They do not care how fast you can solve a generic LeetCode puzzle. They want to see if you understand memory management, distributed state, and thread safety. The virtual onsite had a mix of deep system architecture and a heavy live coding session where you actually have to compile, run, and debug your code.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Databricks
Interview
Screening round was a system design question.
Did not make it through. I do think for such an involved question, the interviewer spent a bit too long explaining the question at the beginning and didn't leave enough time for me to implement the solution. But that was probably not the reason for not passing.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard system design question. Practice with Hello Interview or similar site.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Databricks
Interview
Interview consisted of 5 rounds: 2 system design (single box and distributed), 1 coding and 2 behavioral and personal deep dive. Overall the experience was pretty good. The interviewers were nice, seemed to pay all attention, and all of them were really smart and fun to talk to.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding was not a typical leetcode style, instead it was a generic problem, which could be tacked on with follow ups like better structuring, modularity etc. Single box design focussed on concurrency, reliability and crash recovery. The discussion on past projects was extremely detailed and technical. The system design question seemed too focussed on the domain rather than one of the standard distributed design questions.
