Databricks Software Engineer Interview Questions
Databricks Software Engineer interview questions focus on algorithmic coding and deeper systems problems that reflect real-world, data-intensive challenges. What’s distinctive about Databricks is the strong emphasis on distributed-systems thinking and performance: interviewers often probe Spark/Delta Lake concepts, cluster/resource tradeoffs, concurrency, and practical optimization rather than purely theoretical puzzles. Candidates are typically evaluated on problem-solving, code clarity and correctness, systems design for scale, debugging and performance reasoning, and communication skills that show how they collaborate across product and data teams. Effective interview preparation balances algorithm practice with hands-on distributed-systems experience. Expect a multi-stage process that usually begins with a recruiter screen and a timed coding assessment or technical phone screen, followed by deeper coding rounds, a system-design/architecture interview tailored to data platforms, and behavioral or hiring-manager conversations. Most interviews are virtual and use online IDEs. To prepare, do timed coding mocks, study distributed-systems fundamentals and Spark internals, build and optimize small ETL/Spark jobs, and craft concise STAR stories showing ownership and impact. During interviews, explain tradeoffs, write clear testable code, ask clarifying questions, and avoid undocumented assumptions.
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Design a single-node persistent in-memory cache
Scenario Design a single-machine cache used by a web service to handle read/write requests. The cache should: - Store key/value pairs in memory (fast ...
Minimize run-length encoded length with deletions
Problem You are given a string s (uppercase English letters) and an integer k. You may delete at most k characters from s. After deletions, you compre...
Find path in implicit Fibonacci tree
You are given a special family of binary trees called Fibonacci trees. The k‑th order Fibonacci tree T(k) is defined recursively: - T(1) is a single n...
Find k customers with least revenue
Problem You are given a list of purchase events. Each event contains: - customer_id (string or int) - amount (integer, may be 0; assume non-negative u...
Implement streaming RLE and bit-packed codec
You are implementing a simple compression scheme for sequences of 32‑bit signed integers. The codec should support two encoding strategies: 1. Run‑Len...
Design a KV store with QPS API
Design a key-value (KV) store that supports basic read/write operations and also exposes an API to report QPS (queries per second). Functional require...
Design a Visa-like payment processing system
System Design Prompt Design a card payment processing system similar to a Visa/Mastercard network. The system should support: - Card-present and card-...
Determine allow/deny for an IP via CIDR rules
Problem You are implementing a simple IPv4 firewall. You are given an ordered list of rules. Each rule has: - an action: either ALLOW or DENY - a CIDR...
Choose fastest transportation mode on city grid
You live in a city modeled as a 2D grid. Each cell is either: - A transportation mode 1..4 where: - 1 = Walk, 2 = Bike, 3 = Car, 4 = Train - S = sou...
Design KV store with sliding-window average QPS
Problem Design an in-memory key–value store that supports mutation operations and can report the average QPS (queries per second) over a recent time w...
Compute 5-minute rolling average load
You are building a monitoring component for a key–value (KV) store. Each request contributes 1 unit of load at its request time. Design a data structu...
Design a multi-threaded synchronous log writer
Problem Design a log writer component that is called from multiple application threads and writes logs to a single file on disk. Requirements: - Calle...
Optimize least-k revenue queries for read/write load
Follow-up Scenario Now assume revenue is not provided as a flat list of events, but may be nested, for example: - Each customer has many orders, and e...
Implement run-length encoding and decoding
You are given a string consisting of lowercase English letters. You need to implement run-length encoding (RLE) and its corresponding decoding. 1. Enc...
Implement a rate-limited hit counter
You are designing a hit counter that records the number of hits received in the past 5 minutes. Implement a class HitCounter with the following method...
Design Tic-Tac-Toe and QPS data structures
You are given two independent coding problems that focus on data structure and API design. --- Problem 1: Generalized Tic-Tac-Toe Game with Simple AI ...
Design CRUD APIs with async jobs
Scenario Design a small backend service that manages a core entity with CRUD operations and also supports an asynchronous background job triggered by ...
Design a durable key-value store
System Design: Durable Key–Value Store Context Design a single-node, embeddable key–value store library with a simple API that must remain correct and...
Check if CIDR is fully canceled by rules
You are given: - A target CIDR block T as a string, e.g. "10.0.0.0/16". - A list of rule CIDR blocks. Each rule has: - A type: either "allow" or "de...
Find all anagram start indices
Problem Given two strings s and p, return all starting indices of substrings in s that are anagrams (permutations) of p. Input - s: string - p: string...