I applied through other source. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Databricks in Jan 2022
Interview
Speedy, intense, engaging and challenging. The hiring manager reached out to me on Linkedin directly, and was my main point of contact throughout the process. He was supportive, had my back, and rooted for me to succeed.
Six rounds within two weeks:
1. Screening round with the hiring manager
2. Coding round (take home): One week time to complete 2 out of 3 assignments on the Databricks platform using Pyspark.
3. Architecture interview with a Senior peer: given a business usecase of a customer trying to solve a data engineering plus predictive analytics problem, design an architecture of the workflow (whiteboarding).
4. Technical interview with a Senior peer: Expect to be grilled on every aspect of an ML project you have worked on, probing on why you did what you did.
5. Situational interview: The toughest one for me, a role play situation, where two managers and a peer play the role of a new customer, and you as an SA of Databricks make a tech pitch. You will get a slide deck to prepare, and use your own ideas to present. They are interested in how you conduct yourself in a situation like that, more than the content of the pitch (they don' expect you to be a Databricks expert already).
6. Executive interview: A senior exec will talk to you to understand your motivations for this role and explain their vision.
7. Lastly came the talk about offer with HR.
It all happened virtually for me. Easily the best interview experience I have had, and I have had quite a few!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: How would you get the data from the client's local ftp server to AWS s3?
Q: What is so random about random forest?
Q: How will you handle imbalanced classes in a particular classification problem?
I applied online and was contacted by a recruiter for an initial call. My background and experience were not aligned with the role, so we did not proceed to the next round.
Unfortunately, the interview experience was not very positive. The recruiter was late to the scheduled call, and the communication style felt somewhat one-sided and pushy rather than collaborative. I would have appreciated a more balanced and respectful conversation.
Multiple rounds of interview , take home assessment was not very tough . But panel presentation round was tough , it seems they want candidate who can wow them even though all rounds went fine .
I go the first phone call which went pretty well. Then I passed a first panel round on simple architecture. Did first round technical round, but never heard back again.