Databricks Interview Questions
Practice 100 real Databricks interview questions for 2026. Covers all top categories — Coding & Algorithms, System Design, Behavioral & Leadership, Statistics & Math, Software Engineering Fundamentals — across Software Engineer, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, and Data Engineer roles. Real questions from actual interviews with detailed solutions; this collection explains what’s distinctive about Databricks interviews, what interviewers evaluate, what to expect in each round, and how to structure your interview preparation. Expect a heavy software-engineering tilt: Software Engineer rounds repeatedly probe storage and data-platform design (hierarchical file systems, cache designs, lakehouse tradeoffs), distributed job scheduling and dependency-aware pipelines, concurrency and multithreaded systems (synchronous log writers, thread-safe KV stores), and performance-focused algorithmic problems and query optimizations. Data Scientist questions emphasize regression assumptions and coefficient transformations, similarity search across datasets, hypothesis testing and metric tradeoffs (ROC-AUC vs PR-AUC), and product-analytics counting problems. Machine Learning Engineer prompts focus on implementing algorithms (gradient descent, lazy arrays) and safety/OOM detection for models. Data Engineer coverage targets data-quality diagnostics, Spark/partitioning and pipeline performance. To prepare, prioritize timed coding practice, system-design sketches that show tradeoffs for data systems, concise statistics explanations, and polished STAR stories for behavioral rounds.
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Partition a Target String by Source Substrings
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Design a key-value store
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Design CRUD APIs with async jobs
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Explain ROC-AUC vs PR-AUC tradeoffs
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Implement Gradient Descent Regression
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Design In-Memory QPS Counter
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Design a thread-safe bounded queue
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Design a generic key-value store
Design a Generic, Type-Safe Key-Value Store API Context You're asked to design a reusable key-value store with a generic, user-friendly API. The store...
Design concurrent range-aware file caching client
Design concurrent range-aware file caching client System Design: High-throughput Client-side Ranged-read File Cache You are asked to design and specif...
Solve graph path, interval deletion, and robbery
Solve graph path, interval deletion, and robbery Part A — Optimal path with transport modes: You are given a directed weighted graph of a city. Each e...
Implement Linear Regression Gradient Descent
Implement simple linear regression from scratch using batch gradient descent. Given training data with one input feature x and target y, fit a model o...
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...
Resolve a Design Conflict
Describe a time you had a disagreement with teammates or stakeholders about a technical design decision. Explain the context, the competing options, t...