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Databricks Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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17 results
- Downleveled from L6 to L5, Same Question Twice, RejectedDatabricks · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
I applied for L6 with 9 years of experience, and got a referral. The HR screen questions made me a little uncomfortable. Starting from the first company after I graduated all the way to my current one, they asked about every single one why I left and whether I got promoted. But the HR seemed nice, and scheduled a phone screen for a week later. Phone screen: the book seller question. Honestly I di…
- Game Logic, Referral Credits, and Chat DesignDatabricks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
The report describes two coding sessions and a chat-system design discussion in a Databricks onsite. One coding exercise involved a turn-based board game, including player switching, board output, and correctly ending wins or draws. Its follow-up introduced automated play. The other exercise tracked account credits associated with referrals, queried accounts meeting a threshold, and extended cred…
- System Design Screen on the Bookstore Question, Passed After a WeekDatabricks · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
The interviewer seemed like a very senior person, I felt his level was really high. I got the hugely popular Bookstore question. He asked a lot of questions about failure modes. For example: if the request inserts into the DB but then SQS fails, what should happen? How can we prevent that? I said I would use a transaction outbox. He said he had never heard of that pattern, we spent a while with m…
- Cleared the Full Onsite, Then Rejected After a Messy Reference-Check SagaDatabricks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2026Rejected
Phone screen: system design — design a music playlist. The recruiter told me it would be a full-stack SD round with front-end code and everything, so I spent a long time brushing up on React, but it turned out to just be a normal SD round with no front-end content at all. My answer was pretty average. The interviewer seemed nice but looked exhausted the whole time — not sure if he was just overwo…
- Phone Screen Plus Five Onsite Rounds, Then an OfferDatabricks · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Jul 2026Offer
End of June: Phone Screen — Coding: KV Store + Hit Counter Implement a KV Store that also supports tracking averageGet and averagePut. The main focus was on how to maintain a sliding window, and the follow-up extended it to stats over the past 1 hour, 1 day, and 1 week. Early July: Onsite 1 — Coding: File Encryption Tree Optimization Given a file system tree made of DirectoryNode and FileNode, wh…
- A Sliding Window String Question in Tech ScreeningDatabricks · Software 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…
- Hit Counter Question, Rejected Over an Edge CaseDatabricks · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jun 2026Rejected
The question was hit counter. This question isn't very clearly documented on the boards in terms of the exact requirements and follow-ups, so let me share what I remember as a reference. They started by giving 3 APIs and said I could ask clarifying questions: put(key, value) get(key) get_load() # this gets the QPS for get and put separately — I actually wrote two separate ones for each The requir…
- Cold Recruiter Screen, Rejected Before I Parked the CarDatabricks · Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) · Senior+ · HR Screen · May 2026Rejected
Databricks recruiters are really arrogant. I took the recruiter's call today while driving to the office, and it turned out to be the right call — I didn't waste much time. I'd honestly forgotten when I casually applied for this senior FDE role. Right off the bat she asked, coldly: "Where are you located, specifically which city?" I said I was in the Bay Area — I was worried that naming a specifi…
- Seven Rounds, Batch Write Three Times, No OfferDatabricks · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · May 2026Rejected
Databricks AI platform team, Staff level. I reached out to the hiring manager directly on my own and got the interview that way — it went straight to the VO (virtual onsite), skipping the phone screen. The initial loop was 5 rounds, then they added 2 more rounds afterward, and I still got rejected. I think I answered well. This is just how Databricks is — they don't really seem to have much since…
- A Snapshot Set Iterator and an Interviewer Who Wouldn't Stop InterferingDatabricks · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
Snapshot set iterator — the problem said the return order didn't matter. After I said I needed two data structures — a list of logs and a dict — and laid out my rough approach, the interviewer asked if I had another way to do it. Then he suggested that instead of one shared logs list for all keys, it could just be a dict where each key has its own logs, rather than all keys sharing one list of lo…
- Passed Two Screens, Stuck on No HeadcountDatabricks · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026No response
I had two phone interviews (technical screens). Round 1 was probably a new question from the interviewer — really hard. Given a set of node groups (e.g. [[1],[2,3],[4,5,6]]), connect all the groups into one connected graph. The way to connect: pick one node at random from each of two different groups and build an edge between them. The final graph needs to be connected, using the minimum number o…
- Strong-Hire Feedback, Rejected at the Hiring CommitteeDatabricks · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
I just got the update — rejected at HC. I really can't help venting about this: they set expectations so high and then tell you you got rejected at the hiring committee stage. I was interviewing for a senior fullstack role. Phone screen was mid-June — the classic high-frequency anagram LeetCode question. I finished in 20 minutes, wrote my own test, and as soon as it passed, that was it — call ove…
- Stumped by a 'Fibonacci Tree' Path Question in the Technical ScreenDatabricks · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Nov 2025Rejected
I'd ground the recent high-frequency questions down to nothing, and then they hit me with an old, unprepared-for question: find path within Fibonacci tree. The problem doesn't give you a node structure, and you're not even allowed to write your own. The input is order: int, start: int, end: int. Find the shortest path from start to end. Right away I explained a brute force approach, and the inter…
- Rejected Same Day Despite a Smooth BFS SolutionDatabricks · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2025Rejected
The interviewer was a Senior engineer, and he was 5 minutes late. He started off explaining what his team does — since this was a direct match on background with an infra team, I spent about 3-5 minutes introducing what I used to do on my previous team, and he asked me one question about it. After this intro segment, there was about 45 minutes left. The actual interview started. It was a known qu…
- Design a Hit Counter in a Key-Value StoreDatabricks · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
The interviewer emphasized that he wanted me to focus on analyzing my decisions and writing high quality code, etc. The question was: design a hit counter in a key-value store. But it wasn't stated that directly at first — the interviewer built up the requirements step by step. Design a key-value store -> asked me to think about the user experience I said I'd use generics, but in the middle I mad…
- Passed the Phone Screen, Tripped Up by an Unusual System Programming Onsite RoundDatabricks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2025Rejected
I got rejected. Overall the interviewers were all pretty nice, the whole process moved fast, and HR replied quickly too (feels like the grind-heavy companies all reply fast). It's just that they kept using the word "smart" — coworkers are all smart, they only hire smart people. I just wanted nice coworkers; "smart" doesn't really appeal to me at all, it actually made me feel some pressure. It fel…
- Behavioral, Technical Screen, and a Week-Long CodeSignal AssessmentDatabricks · Solutions Architect · Take-home Project · Jul 2025
A while back, a recruiter from Databricks reached out about a Solutions Architect position. Since it had some relevance to my background, I figured I'd interview for it and give it a shot, so I wanted to share my fresh-off-the-press interview notes with everyone — hope this helps. The first round was a behavioral interview with the hiring manager, mainly talking about my past experience along wit…
