The hiring process at Databricks takes an average of 60 days when considering 2 user submitted interviews across all job titles. Candidates applying for Big Data Architect had the quickest hiring process (on average 60 days), whereas Big Data Architect roles had the slowest hiring process (on average 60 days).
Longer interview process compared to other companies in my experience. I had multiple rounds, including a 30-60-90, and did not get the first opportunity. However, after following up and looking at open reqs, I was able to find a best match.
I applied through other source. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Databricks (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2022
Interview
After spending a considerable amount of time putting together a demo and slides deck, crafting a narrative and a message for a presentation and demo in a panel interview in a final 5 minutes meeting where the hiring manager showed up more than 5 minutes late, I only received negative feedback saying I wouldn't be able to communicate effectively with customers.
Who would want to work for a hiring manager like this?
It was humiliating to only get negative feedback and be treated like an afterthought.
I think with hiring managers like this Best Place to work for this company feels overrated.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There were many questions which I thought I was able to answer as a professional to the best of my ability in a constructive and objective way.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Databricks (Charlotte, NC) in Feb 2022
Interview
Very hard interviews. I am a seasoned big data lead who drives multiple teams and still found the level of questions in the interviews pretty tough. I thought they would ask questions around features of Spark, joins, optimization etc. However, in Tech round 1 I was asked deep case study based questions around memory management, multithreading, resource constraints in streaming, pooling etc. The take home assignment was also quite heavy, having questions from sql, pipeline optimization, software engineering and mlflow. Took the juice out of me, but I found them to the more relevant to the job as compared to random Leetcode problems. Tech Round 2 was almost like a stress interview with two people shooting questions at me about an architecture and debating every answer. I felt almost noone was getting convinced. Later, they told me they were just grilling me to see how I handle tough situations. The leadership interviews were more on the breadth of my experience. The best thing was that the Recruiter was amazing, frequently available to texts and calls to guide me.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Optimize a multi hour spark job. I was able to reduce it to 1.5 mins but couldn’t make it faster however hard I tried.