Databricks interview questions

Showing 31–60 of 122 results

• Design a Collaborative Playlist EditorMedium

  Tests your ability to architect a real-time collaborative frontend application, focusing on client-side state synchronization, deterministic list ordering, idempotent mutation protocols, and graceful network reconnection.

  DatabricksFrontend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Customer Revenue Index with Referrals and Threshold QueriesMedium

  Tests designing an in-memory index that tracks direct and referral revenue across customers and efficiently supports threshold-bounded minimum revenue queries using balanced search trees.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Design a Distributed File SystemMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a scalable, fault-tolerant distributed file system by addressing challenges in metadata management, data chunking, and cluster availability.

  DatabricksBackend EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Distributed File System, Scoping the Requirements YourselfMedium

  Design a distributed file system from a one-line prompt, driving the scoping of workload, semantics, scale and durability yourself. Tests separating metadata from data, block replication and placement, read and write paths, failure recovery, and scaling the namespace for a staff-level backend role.

  DatabricksBackend EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Durable Concurrent Event WriterHard

  Design a high-throughput, thread-safe embedded log writer that safely batches and persists records from thousands of concurrent producer threads into an append-only file.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Hierarchical File SystemHard

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed file system namespace capable of handling millions of files and directories with strong consistency and high availability.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a KV store with QPS APIHard

  This question tests the ability to design a distributed key-value store architecture that incorporates observability, specifically tracking per-key or per-prefix Queries Per Second (QPS) metrics in real-time.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Key-Value Store with Hit CountingHard

  Design a concurrent, in-memory key-value store that tracks read-access frequency using a sliding-window hit counter per key while keeping memory footprint bounded.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Design a Shared, Crash-Safe Telemetry Buffer for Thousands of Worker ThreadsMedium

  Design a single, thread-shared component that lets up to 4,000 worker threads inside one process append small telemetry records to one local file, durably and without a disk sync per call. Tests group-commit concurrency design, a crash-safe on-disk record format, and backpressure reasoning.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Slack-Like Messaging SystemMedium

  Tests your ability to architect a scalable, real-time messaging platform like Slack, focusing on connection handling, fan-out delivery, channel message ordering, and presence management.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Thread-Safe Buffered Writer with a Background Flush ThreadMedium

  Tests the ability to design a high-throughput, thread-safe buffering system that decouples client write operations from high-latency storage I/O using concurrent synchronization, backpressure, and background worker threads.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Visa-Style Card Payment Processing SystemMedium

  Design a Visa-style card payment system, choosing between the card network and a merchant-side scope. Tests real-time authorization routing to issuers, idempotent handling of retries and reversals, clearing and settlement with an auditable ledger, fraud checks, and multi-region availability.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Visa-like payment processing systemHard

  This problem tests your ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant transaction processing system that guarantees data integrity across distributed services.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Write-Ahead Log Writer with Batch WritesHard

  Design and implement a concurrent write-ahead log (WAL) engine featuring group commit, monotonic sequence assignment, torn-tail crash recovery, and explicit durability promises.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Design a digital game shop backendHard

  This question tests your ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant transaction processing system for a digital storefront, focusing on data consistency and concurrency control.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a generic key-value storeMedium

  This question evaluates a software engineer's ability to design a clean, type-safe API for a generic key-value store, covering data modeling, interface design, and extensibility. It tests practical software design skills including generics, error handling, concurrency, and the ability to evolve an in-memory prototype into a persistent implementation without breaking callers.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a key-value storeHard

  This question evaluates understanding of durable storage and crash-consistency, including on-disk data layout, filesystem durability semantics, concurrency control, and performance trade-offs for single-node embeddable key–value engines.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a multithreaded event loggerMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a thread-safe, high-throughput logging system that balances memory efficiency with I/O performance under concurrent load.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Design a rolling event tracker with rangesMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of time-series data structures and streaming counters, testing algorithm design, space/time complexity analysis, correctness across edge cases, and handling of large-scale event tracking.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design a single-node persistent in-memory cacheHard

  This question evaluates a candidate's skills in single-node cache design, including in-memory key/value storage, eviction policy management (e.g., LRU), durability considerations, concurrency control, and techniques for reducing contention such as sharding or striping.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a stock order managerMedium

  Design an equity Order Management System (OMS) that manages order lifecycles, ensures idempotent broker interactions, and guarantees state reconciliation under distributed failures.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a thread-safe bounded queueHard

  This question evaluates skills in concurrent programming, synchronization primitives, and designing thread-safe bounded data structures that support blocking operations with timeouts, fairness, and backpressure.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignHR Screen
• Design an IP filter using CIDR rulesMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of IP addressing and CIDR notation, bit-level conversion between prefixes and integer ranges, and the design of scalable data structures and algorithms for prefix/range queries, rule priority handling, and rule-set operations (allow/deny semantics).

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design an Online Book Seller PlatformMedium

  Design an end-to-end e-commerce platform for selling books, balancing read-heavy catalog exploration with strictly consistent inventory reservation and fault-tolerant checkout workflows.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an Online BookstoreHard

  This problem tests your ability to design a distributed e-commerce platform by focusing on consistency models for inventory, scalable search architecture, and robust order processing.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an efficient Tic-Tac-Toe engineMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of efficient algorithm design and minimal state management for a Tic-Tac-Toe engine on an n x n board, including constraints such as O(1) time per move and O(n) space.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design an n x n Tic-Tac-Toe GameMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design an efficient class to manage game state, focusing on constant-time win condition checking using auxiliary data structures.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design an online bookstore: DB insert succeeds but SQS publish fails, and duplicate messagesMedium

  System design question about an online bookstore whose order service inserts orders into a database and then publishes messages to Amazon SQS. Probes what should happen when the insert succeeds but the publish fails, how to keep the database and queue consistent across crashes, and how consumers avoid duplicate processing under at-least-once delivery.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design bookstore and chat messaging systemsMedium

  This question tests the ability to design two distinct systems: a reliable transactional e-commerce inventory service and a low-latency real-time chat application, focusing on appropriate database choices and communication protocols.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design concurrent range-aware file caching clientHard

  This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Design concurrent range-aware file caching client states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.

  DatabricksSoftware EngineerSystem DesignHR Screen