I am working at one of the FAANG and talking to various companies in the Valley. The interview process with Databricks was the worst experiences I had so far. 1. the whole process took more than 3 months. I went through recruiter chat, phone interview, hiring manager chat, another hiring manager chat, recruiter chat, one day virtual onsite, taking home assignment, colleague references. Yes Databricks is a startup that is growing fast but think twice before about whether it worth the time. They are a lot other good companies are also hiring. Do not waste time with them! 2. the recruiters are very unprofessional. The interact with the interviewers were good but the recruiters are very unprofessional. They did not answer any question and just reply with the email template. Was checking for other roles responsibilities but the recruiter think that you are only fit for the role that they are hiring. Asking for the feedback about the phone interview but never received a response until one month later, with a move forward template. Since I also have other pending offers so I would like to get the final result sooner but again the email never got replied, until 3 weeks later. 3. the hiring bar is clear. All the feedbacks from the interviews are good but at last they decided not to move forward because background does not match. I do not know if they are not hiring or if they have a very high bar. but if you find the candidate does not match, please do not waste other's time at the beginning.

The Databricks interview is notoriously tough and they absolutely live up to that reputation. The process moved quickly but the technical bar is incredibly high. They do not care how fast you can solve a generic LeetCode puzzle. They want to see if you understand memory management, distributed state, and thread safety. The virtual onsite had a mix of deep system architecture and a heavy live coding session where you actually have to compile, run, and debug your code.