The process unfolded as follows:

1. HR Intro/Pulse Screen: A basic review of the role to determine high-level fit and interest for moving forward.
2. Hiring Manager Interview: Casual and conversational, with a focus on your resume and accomplishments. Essentially, do you vibe with the hiring manager?
3. Take-home Assignment: To be completed within a provided Databricks environment. Three tracks were available:
   • Machine Learning (build a simple model and explain how it works with provided data)
   • SQL (write basic queries, tuning questions, etc.)
   • Data Engineering
4. Technical Screen: Big data engineering focus.
5. Panel Interview: Case-driven, with the interviewee playing the role of a Databricks SA by preparing a demonstration and presentation to facilitate the conversation.

Based upon the above framework, my experience was:

1. HR Screen: Very basic and uneventful.
2. Hiring Manager Interview: Around an hour in length, with the conversation geared toward experience, background, and work style. This was a decent conversation and, again, fairly uneventful.
3. Take-home Assignment: This was a fairly technical exercise and took around half a day to complete. Depending on your background, this could vary, but it was very similar to what you'd experience in a 101 course.
4. Tech Screen: This is where the red flags started to arise. The screen was conducted by a junior employee who literally read off a script. The focus was solely on designing big data architectures and experience in data engineering. Completely fair for the role, but not areas in which I had experience. I made this unequivocally clear in the preceding HR and Hiring Manager interviews. This went poorly, as one could imagine. At the end of the interview, I even broke character and brought up once again that this was not my background. I was met with, "That's okay; no one comes in knowing everything; we can teach you." I left the interview skeptical with minimal expectation of moving forward. I received an overly positive email from the recruiter a few days later inviting me to the next interview stage. I was puzzled yet, for a variety of personal reasons, compelled to continue.
5. Panel/Case Interview: Several representatives from SA management and Sales. The attendees felt fairly unenthusiastic and unprepared from the outset. I doubt any had actually glanced at my resume. The case was extremely high-level and ambiguous (by design). I genuinely agree with the case design, as ambiguity is a known entity in exploratory sales conversations. The problem I had was being specifically driven to discuss areas within the Databricks platform that I had communicated (three times now) were not my background. This effectively turned into a pack of wolves berating me for 30 minutes. Never in my career have I been in such an ugly client-facing meeting, let alone a simulated one. The outcome of the meeting felt completely premeditated, with there being a "let's break this guy" scenario. My suspicion is that I was moved forward as a checkbox for X candidates to clear the final round in order to make a decision. If that was not the case, this was an impressive waste of time by all parties involved.

In summary, if you decide to interview with this company, qualify the opportunity as much as possible. If something seems weird, it probably is. This was, by and large, the longest and most time-consuming interview process I have ever been a part of. The process dragged out for two months, with most of it being completely avoidable. There definitely are some areas of the hiring process that are broken. Whether it be incompetence or some other self-serving intention, these guys will waste your time without hesitation. Definitely a sense of arrogance and entitlement.

How would you design the big data architecture for client XYZ?