Databricks Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Sliding Window String Question in Tech Screening

I recently interviewed for a tech screening at Databricks — a string-related question that comes up a lot on the forum. The question itself was fairly simple, and I hope it helps whoever interviews after me.

The question was roughly: given a longer string and a shorter pattern, find the earliest contiguous substring in the long string such that the substring contains exactly the same characters as the pattern, just possibly in a different order. If no such substring exists, return -1.

I just did it with a fixed sliding window, and wrote it through without much trouble.

Afterward we talked about the character set — things like how to handle it if it's UTF-8/Unicode.

I wrote my own tests, and it was clear they wanted me to think through a lot of edge cases. They also reminded me to think about handling exceptional situations and error returns.

The interviewer talked like a machine gun... but overall the experience was fine.