I interviewed with Databricks up to the coding challenge, upon which I dropped out of further pursuing the opportunity. The interview process felt off right from the start - my initial recruiter call felt like I was being prepared for a quiz as to how much I know about Databricks. As I got further into the process, the culture continued to feel off - they generally seemed unappreciative of my time. When I asked for a week long extension for the coding problem (as I was going through a busy period in my life), they never responded to me. I dropped out because the impression I was given felt very arrogant. The attitude seemed to be one of "we know we're in a good position, and you're lucky we gave you a shot at interviewing." At the end of the day, I was concerned by that impression and worried that other talent with perspective would be similarly taken aback by that attitude. Other friends who had talked to Databricks before agreed with my impression of the company. The phone screen interviewer himself was very nice and I had no complaints about him or how that interview was conducted.

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.