Databricks Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Phone Screen Plus Five Onsite Rounds, Then an Offer

Databricks·Software Engineer·Jul 2026
OnsiteTechnical ScreenSenior+Offermedium

End of June:

Phone Screen — Coding: KV Store + Hit Counter
Implement a KV Store that also supports tracking averageGet and averagePut. The main focus was on how to maintain a sliding window, and the follow-up extended it to stats over the past 1 hour, 1 day, and 1 week.

Early July:

Onsite 1 — Coding: File Encryption Tree Optimization
Given a file system tree made of DirectoryNode and FileNode, where each FileNode has an is_encrypted status, traverse the tree to count encrypted / unencrypted files, then choose between file-level or directory-level encryption calls to minimize total encryption cost.

Onsite 2 — System Programming: Concurrent File Logger
Implement a concurrent file logger that supports multiple threads writing logs at the same time. Needed to handle thread locking, buffering, and concurrent file writes, plus some performance optimization follow-ups.
Reference: Concurrent File Logger

Onsite 3 — Coding: Tic Tac Toe
Design a generic Tic Tac Toe where the board is N x M, and getting K identical pieces in a row in any direction wins. Need to check after every move whether a player has won.
Reference: Design Tic Tac Toe

Onsite 4 — HM / Past Experience
Talked with the hiring manager about past experience, mostly around project history, impact, and cross-functional collaboration. Felt like they cared a lot about cross-functional work.

Onsite 5 — Architecture: Design a Book Seller Platform
Design an online book seller platform supporting book browsing/search, inventory, ordering, payment, and order management — the classic e-commerce feature set.
Reference: Book Seller Platform

The day after the onsite, they asked me for a reference, and it went through smoothly after that.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Databricks
Role
Software Engineer
Level
Senior+
Rounds
Technical Screen → Onsite
Outcome
Offer
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Jul 2026
Questions from this interview
4 questions

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