I applied for L6 with 9 years of experience, and got a referral.
The HR screen questions made me a little uncomfortable. Starting from the first company after I graduated all the way to my current one, they asked about every single one why I left and whether I got promoted. But the HR seemed nice, and scheduled a phone screen for a week later.
Phone screen: the book seller question. Honestly I didn't read any interview reports for this one. I looked through their question bank, but I assumed the phone screen would be coding. I answered it okay in the end, but I felt I didn't quite have enough time.
Then I got a different HR, who told me I passed but would need to be downleveled to L5, and scheduled 4 virtual onsite rounds, back to back over two days.
Coding - tic tac toe. Nothing much to say about this one.
Cross-function - a normal behavioral question, but I felt the interviewer didn't really want to hear technical details. A few times I tried to give a bit of technical background and got interrupted, so overall it didn't feel smooth.
Architecture - this one was kind of ridiculous. The interviewer gave me the book seller question again. I told the interviewer that I had discussed this question in my first phone round and asked whether they wanted to switch, and the interviewer was very surprised, but said they hadn't prepared anything else, so no switch - -! This was the round that felt the least smooth to me. For some of the questions I already knew the answer, and I kept going back and forth on whether to ask clarifying questions anyway, my head just couldn't focus, and in the end it was like I was reciting an answer, with not much interaction and a lack of vibe.
System - log writer
A week later I got the rejection. I had already stopped expecting anything right after the interviews, but it still made me a little sad, and all I can do is console myself that I don't have to find people for reference checks. Overall the interview experience was pretty good, both HRs seemed nice and were very efficient. But with Databricks, the interview questions are all high-frequency ones and they don't even switch them. What level of answer is actually expected? This is the first time I've gone through a loop where I had seen every single question in the question bank beforehand.
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