I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Databricks (San Francisco, CA) in Aug 2019
Interview
I would say by far the worst experience I've ever had. I was reached out by the recruiter to give a video technical screen. After clearing that, I had an interview with the hiring manager. Till here, everything was good.
I was then called onsite. I had to commute to San Francisco for this interview. The HR greeted me and escorted me to a room. The first interview was with 2 people who got a laptop on which I was supposed to code. The coding task was ambiguous. They wanted me to code a problem in assembly language programming. Apparently this was to check how good a candidate is at picking up new skills. The interview went fine. It was followed by a cross-team interview which was conducted by a manager. All questions here were totally behavioral. This was followed by lunch. The guy came in, answered my questions, and left the room. After this, I ate my lunch and was waiting for the following 4 interviews to start which were all going to be technical interviews. It was 10 minutes past the interview start time, and nobody came to the room. I emailed the HR regarding this. After another 10 minutes, she came and told me that something in the product had BROKE, and all their engineering team is fixing it. So there is no one available to conduct the interview, and asked me to leave. I was told that they'll contact me to schedule part 2 of interviews.
This behavior is totally unacceptable. If you dont want to conduct the interviews, atleast dont lie! Thats the worst thing a company could do.
When a candidate walks in for an interview, the least thing you can do is to make the candidate feel comfortable. Nobody goes to an onsite interview to feel humiliated.
My advice to the company:
Please never do this to any other candidate.
Also thinking too high about yourself and the company is bad. Best places and people are the ones who are humble.
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Other Software Engineer Interview Reviews for Databricks
Had an initial recruiter screen for a Software Engineer position. The call lasted around 15 minutes and covered the usual ground: my background and experience, motivation for applying, current role, and salary expectations. The recruiter also gave a clear overview of teams, the product, and the full interview process ahead.
1. Phone interview with HR.
2. Technical coding question using coder pad. Have to implement from scratch.
Interview process was very fast and recruiter was friendly
Question was little vague but it seems to be leaked a lot on the internet
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why Databricks?
Past experience.
Projects you have worked on
didn't make it past the first technical round. questions are decently challenging (ie: leetcode med/hard level difficulty), and can range from very mathy topics to bit manipulation, to dynamic programming. be prepared for all scenarios and all topics on leetcode.