The interview process felt completely disorganized and misaligned from the start.
While the HR stage was brief and superficial, the real issue was the follow-up interview with the Hiring Manager. It was chaotic, rushed, and lacked any clear structure. I barely had the chance to speak or ask questions before being interrupted or redirected. It honestly felt like they were just trying to get through it as fast as possible.
The questions jumped all over the place — far beyond what was described in the job posting or what HR had outlined. It was a confusing mix of system design, coding, and behavioral questions, with a heavy focus on implementation details that clearly targeted a pure software engineering profile rather than an ML engineer role. There was little to no discussion about the actual projects, the team, or how my experience could fit in.
Overall, the whole thing came off as generic, uncoordinated, and poorly thought-out. It felt like they weren’t evaluating people for the role described, but for some internal checklist that had nothing to do with the position advertised.
They asked me for specific lines of code inside functions, inside open-source libraries.
The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Databricks Senior Applied AI Engineer role in Portugal.
Databricks's interview process for their Senior Applied AI Engineer roles in Portugal is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Databricks's Senior Applied AI Engineer interview process in Portugal.