TLDR: Ghosted. Horrible interview experience. Don't waste your time with Databricks.

I was contacted by a recruiter and, having heard many great things about Databricks, I thought it would be a great next landing spot if I could make it through the LeetCode gauntlet. The recruiter told me upfront that the process would involve a technical phone screen, a behavioral interview call with a manager, a take-home assignment, and then the (virtual) on-site.

My technical phone screen interviewer was late by over 10 minutes, but he was adamant that the problem was doable in the remaining scheduled time. Lucky for me, the interview question has been shared on this site. My interviewer then changed the constraints on the question after I solved the first part.

Two weeks later, after prodding the recruiter a few times, I got a call scheduled with a hiring manager. It was a typical behavioral round, though the hiring manager sounded pretty disinterested.

Another two weeks passed with no response. At this point, the excitement I had for this company was basically zero. But lo and behold, the recruiter got back to me saying that they wanted me to do the take-home assignment.

The take-home assignment given to me was a command-line query parser that was expected to take about 3 hours. On the scheduled date and time, they sent over the spec as well as an engineering contact to answer any questions I had. I spent a little over the suggested amount of time to finish all the items in the spec, write unit/integration tests, and cleaned it up to code review quality. While there are a few things in my implementation that I would do differently in hindsight, I don't think there were any dealbreakers.

Anyhow, this is where my experience with Databricks ended. I was ghosted after spending many hours on the Databricks process. I didn't get any email confirming receipt of my take-home assignment nor any feedback. I emailed the recruiter a couple of times but received no response.

I assume I have been rejected at this point, and I wish Databricks had been courteous enough to let me know the outcome after I spent so many hours on their process.

All in all, I would not recommend going through their interview unless you have lots of time to spend. The LeetCode grind is here to stay, so take the time you would have used to interview for Databricks and apply it to something else.

Decode ways and a variation on it.