The interview process was standard for silicon valley companies, TPS, a panel with Algo & DS, Architecture, System Design, behavioral, team fit, and a coding challenge in the end. As in any other company that requires this many interviews the process was tiring and, although the questions were nothing unusual, I felt that it does require one to prepare exclusively for the interview process - what I mean is that if you just apply without preparing for it there is little chance for you to pass, as the knowledge required by these interviews are rarely present in you day-to-day job in a frequency that will allow you to solve the problems in the provided time. The interviewers were kind and professional, they helped me feel comfortable and conduct the interview in a good way - even though the whole process was online due to Covid restrictions. The only part I didn't like much was the coding challenge, I think it could be more specific on what it was asking, clearly aligning the expectations in order to avoid confusion. I also wish that the recruiters were a little less invasive in questions regarding other companies that I could be in contact with.

The Databricks interview is notoriously tough and they absolutely live up to that reputation. The process moved quickly but the technical bar is incredibly high. They do not care how fast you can solve a generic LeetCode puzzle. They want to see if you understand memory management, distributed state, and thread safety. The virtual onsite had a mix of deep system architecture and a heavy live coding session where you actually have to compile, run, and debug your code.