The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Databricks (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2022
Interview
Spent 40 hours completing their take home assignment for them to tell me they're not moving forward, not even offering a 'grade' on the assignment. Poor interview experience, not much empathy from the recruiters.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions about data engineering, transforming data sets, tons of sql queries and running an ML algo (of your choice)
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Databricks (New York, NY) in Jan 2022
Interview
The interview process was as below:
HR Phone Screen (Role and Logistics)
Technical Interview (Data Science, Data Engineering)
Coding Assignment (SQL queries, Spark optimization, Machine Learning)
Technical Interview (Architecture Whiteboarding)
Super Day (4 Interviews + 1 hr Technical Presentation)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Articulating the business value behind the data science use cases.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Databricks in Mar 2022
Interview
Absolutely disrespectful and a complete waste of time. These people think they are God's gift to earth and are entitled to your time.
I am going to post exactly what happened to me so you can save yourself the hassle.
A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn asking my availability to do an initial call early in the week. I sent it over and don't hear anything from her for a few days. I follow up next week and she tells me she was OOO and connects me with a different recruiter.
This guy does my initial call which went well. Now one thing to note is I am more on the infra/Kubernetes side of things and don't have much experience with big data or ML. I specified this very clearly to the recruiter and he said it's not a big deal since they wanted folks with that experience too.
He sets up the call with the hiring manager. The call went very well and I made it very clear to the HM that I don't have Databricks/Spark experience but am more on the cloud/big data side. He said it is not an issue at all and proceeds to tell me I will have a call with a solutions architect next.
A couple days go by any I hear nothing from the recruiter. I then email the HM asking what's going on and he said he will push to get it scheduled. Then this new recruiter reaches out and asks my availability to schedule the call with the SA.
The call goes very well. Again I made it very clear to the SA that I am more Kubernetes/Infra focused and he said "That's okay, we are looking for folks with that experience to balance out the team since we have quite a bit of data science focused people."
The next step would have been to do a technical assessment which the SA described over the call. The hiring manager also talked about it in the call I had with him.
The call with the SA overall was very positive and I followed up with the hiring manager again (because the recruiter was clearly not good at following up or really doing his job). So then the HM gets back to me saying he wanted more Databricks/data science experience since he was worried I couldn't "ramp up."
You might think I am joking but this is legitimately what happened. Unbelievable waste of time. It's one thing after the recruiter call or initial HM call if he said that. But after assuring me that it's okay and having me speak to the SA who also assured me it's okay then getting told this is pure disrespect and a complete waste of my time. I have a full time job and had to make time for all these calls.
Candidates applying to this role please be aware that these folks have no problem lying to you or wasting your time. Look at all the other stories here and on Blind of them ghosting and make the decision for yourself if you want to go through the process with these people.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Call with HM was about my background and some technical questions.
Call with SA was also about my background and much more technical.