Technical Screen

A Sliding Window String Question in Tech Screening

DatabricksSoftware Engineer · Technical Screen · Jun 2026

I recently interviewed for a tech screening at Databricks — a string-related question that comes up a lot on the forum. The question itself was fairly simple, and I hope it helps whoever interviews after me. The question was roughly: given a longer string and a shorter pattern, find the earliest contiguous substring in the long string such that the substring contains exactly the same characters a…

Shared by a candidate · reported Jun 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.