I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Databricks in May 2022
Interview
I had a call with the hiring manager who made it very clear that I was qualified to the next round. We finished the call by “Next, you will have a technical call with a solution architect”. I was then ghosted and had to send 3 follow-ups emails to get any answer.
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Databricks
Interview
One of the worst, unfair and disorganized interview process I have ever been through. I turn down interviewing with them several times but then decided to go for it recently and I regret my decision to do so. The interview process took forever and they don't tell you that in the beginning. They are just looking for engineering types in sales. They are not looking for candidates who are good at building business relationships, interacting with prospects who are from all walks of life, communicating business values etc
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions weren't that difficult but the long time process and the # of people they ask you to interview with while you have to do a full time job at the same time is challenging.
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?