Phone screen: system design — design a music playlist. The recruiter told me it would be a full-stack SD round with front-end code and everything, so I spent a long time brushing up on React, but it turned out to just be a normal SD round with no front-end content at all. My answer was pretty average. The interviewer seemed nice but looked exhausted the whole time — not sure if he was just overworked lol. Got the pass notification two days later.
Onsite (virtual):
SD round: design a chat system. Mostly asked about API design and DB design, plus what the flow looks like for some basic functionality. Didn't ask me to draw the high-level architecture or talk about how to scale it.
Coding 1: KV store + hit counter, with a lot of follow-ups. The interviewer had an MIT undergrad and a Stanford PhD — very smart, very sharp.
Coding 2: the bank reference question.
Two BQ rounds — one with a fairly senior architect who mentioned two or three times right off the bat that he reports directly to the CIO lol, and one with an engineering director. Both were pretty standard BQ content. In the architect round I felt like he was deliberately asking things in a harsh way to put pressure on me, but I think it went well overall — I said something about how we should be managing AI rather than being managed by AI agents, and he laughed and said that was a good line, that it would probably become one of his interview questions from now on.
A week later they told me I'd passed the onsite and asked for 3 references. I gave them 5 the same day (3 former managers + 2 coworkers), and then heard nothing. I followed up once in the meantime and got no response. About a week after that, the recruiter told me they weren't moving forward. I asked for feedback or specifics on where I fell short and never got a reply.
I don't think it was actually bad reference feedback — I'm on good terms with all of those managers, my work has been solid, and they all said they were more than happy to vouch for me. In fact, I suspect Databricks might not have even reached out to my references at all.
Maybe I got backdoor-reference-checked instead. I don't know.
Overall, this feels like a company with a really toxic hiring process — it just drags you through the wringer. The recruiter talked to me in a really condescending way, terrible tone, basically gaslighting you the whole time.
They put me through a whole ordeal. After I asked my managers for references, one of my favorite managers even set up a 1:1 with me to go over what I'd worked on before and what skills the role I was applying for needed — and in the end it feels like they never even reached out to them.
There are all kinds of bad reviews about this company on Blind — apparently when they're hiring they go absolutely wild with backdoor reference checks. If you're coming from a big company, they'll get their internal people to dig through your posts and code, reach out to your current manager, or contact people who barely know you but happen to be LinkedIn connections. They'll ask you for your perf letters and promo letters, and will even reach out to your references' own managers to ask whether that reference is trustworthy or credible.
It feels like they have absolutely no boundaries and no respect for applicants' privacy.
And it feels like nepotism runs pretty deep — a lot of senior people seem to bring over their old coworkers from previous companies (just my own guess from looking at LinkedIn).
Although the Databricks friends I know personally are pretty nice, and the interviewers I had were decent too, on Blind it feels like 90% of their employees are complete idiots, egotistical as hell — like God is number one, Databricks is number two, and OpenAI is number three.
I still think the company itself is fine — what they're building is pretty promising — but the culture is seriously messed up. The whole interview process was just too draining emotionally. I'm never applying there again. Even if they end up making a ton of money down the line, I won't be jealous at all.
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