Interview steps:

• Recruiter conversation
• Phone interview (data structures & algorithms)
• Conversation with a hiring manager
• Take-home coding assignment
• Onsite (3 technical + 1 behavioral)
• Onsite 2 (system design)

I was rejected after the conversation with the hiring manager. Overall, I enjoyed my conversations with the engineers at Databricks, but the interactions with recruiting were not as smooth as they could have been.

Coordinating with the recruiter was very difficult, with several miscommunications along the way. The interview process had many steps and sounded like it would be much more time-consuming than traditional software engineering interviews. They were not transparent upfront about what roles were available. They planned to go through the whole interview process first and then assign candidates to a role. This approach works well when there are many roles, but I was interested in a more specific domain and wanted to ensure a role was available in that area, which was difficult for the recruiter to provide information about.

Describe a technical problem that you solved.