Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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22 stories

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DatabricksSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

Phone Screen Plus Five Onsite Rounds, Then an Offer

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, wh…

OfferOnsite0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Cleared the Full Onsite, Then Rejected After a Messy Reference-Check Saga

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 overwo…

RejectedOnsite0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

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 a…

Technical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

Hit Counter Question, Rejected Over an Edge Case

The question was hit counter. This question isn't very clearly documented on the boards in terms of the exact requirements and follow-ups, so let me share what I remember as a reference. They started by giving 3 APIs and said I could ask clarifying questions: put(key, value) get(key) get_load() # this gets the QPS for get and put separately — I actually wrote two separate ones for each The requir…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
May 2026

A Fibonacci Tree Screen Round That Ran Out of Time

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
May 2026

SnapshotSet Iterator, Ran Out of Time Before Finishing Bisect

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
DatabricksSoftware EngineerSenior+
May 2026

Seven Rounds, Batch Write Three Times, No Offer

Databricks AI platform team, Staff level. I reached out to the hiring manager directly on my own and got the interview that way — it went straight to the VO (virtual onsite), skipping the phone screen. The initial loop was 5 rounds, then they added 2 more rounds afterward, and I still got rejected. I think I answered well. This is just how Databricks is — they don't really seem to have much since…

RejectedOnsite0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Phone Screen on a Multi-Bookstore Price Aggregator

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
DatabricksForward Deployed Engineer (FDE)Senior+
May 2026

Cold Recruiter Screen, Rejected Before I Parked the Car

Databricks recruiters are really arrogant. I took the recruiter's call today while driving to the office, and it turned out to be the right call — I didn't waste much time. I'd honestly forgotten when I casually applied for this senior FDE role. Right off the bat she asked, coldly: "Where are you located, specifically which city?" I said I was in the Bay Area — I was worried that naming a specifi…

RejectedHR Screen0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Passed Two Screens, Stuck on No Headcount

I had two phone interviews (technical screens). Round 1 was probably a new question from the interviewer — really hard. Given a set of node groups (e.g. [[1],[2,3],[4,5,6]]), connect all the groups into one connected graph. The way to connect: pick one node at random from each of two different groups and build an edge between them. The final graph needs to be connected, using the minimum number o…

No responseTechnical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

A Snapshot Set Iterator and an Interviewer Who Wouldn't Stop Interfering

Snapshot set iterator — the problem said the return order didn't matter. After I said I needed two data structures — a list of logs and a dict — and laid out my rough approach, the interviewer asked if I had another way to do it. Then he suggested that instead of one shared logs list for all keys, it could just be a dict where each key has its own logs, rather than all keys sharing one list of lo…

Technical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Strong-Hire Feedback, Rejected at the Hiring Committee

I just got the update — rejected at HC. I really can't help venting about this: they set expectations so high and then tell you you got rejected at the hiring committee stage. I was interviewing for a senior fullstack role. Phone screen was mid-June — the classic high-frequency anagram LeetCode question. I finished in 20 minutes, wrote my own test, and as soon as it passed, that was it — call ove…

RejectedOnsite0
DatabricksMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Cipher Intervals, Gradient Descent From Scratch, and a Harmful Content Design Round

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
DatabricksSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jan 2026

CIDR Segment Trees and a Brutal SQL Query Optimization Round

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Passed the Onsite Loop, Rejected After a Second Algorithm Round

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
DatabricksSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Dec 2025

HR to Onsite Offer, Four Rounds Split Across Two Days

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OfferOnsiteXP0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Nov 2025

A KV Store Question I'd Never Seen Before

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Nov 2025

Stumped by a 'Fibonacci Tree' Path Question in the Technical Screen

I'd ground the recent high-frequency questions down to nothing, and then they hit me with an old, unprepared-for question: find path within Fibonacci tree. The problem doesn't give you a node structure, and you're not even allowed to write your own. The input is order: int, start: int, end: int. Find the shortest path from start to end. Right away I explained a brute force approach, and the inter…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2025

Rejected Same Day Despite a Smooth BFS Solution

The interviewer was a Senior engineer, and he was 5 minutes late. He started off explaining what his team does — since this was a direct match on background with an infra team, I spent about 3-5 minutes introducing what I used to do on my previous team, and he asked me one question about it. After this intro segment, there was about 45 minutes left. The actual interview started. It was a known qu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Design a Hit Counter in a Key-Value Store

The interviewer emphasized that he wanted me to focus on analyzing my decisions and writing high quality code, etc. The question was: design a hit counter in a key-value store. But it wasn't stated that directly at first — the interviewer built up the requirements step by step. Design a key-value store -> asked me to think about the user experience I said I'd use generics, but in the middle I mad…

Technical Screen0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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