I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Databricks (San Luis Obispo, CA) in Oct 2017
Interview
Set up through Andressen Horowitz. First phone interview was introductory, asked a lot of questions about what I knew of Databricks, what projects I had done, what my favorite programming language was, what I expect out of an internship from Databricks, etc. Second interview was phone call and technical screening. Didn't do well on that, but asked for feedback from the interviewer and he was very kind, thorough in his advice, and asked me to reapply next year.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Instructions: You are given a k-by-k grid of letters, plus a dictionary of valid words. Your goal is to find all words you can trace out in the grid, where tracing can move up/down/left/right. For any given word, you can use each grid coordinate at most once. Example:
Grid:
EA
BD
Dictionary:
{BAD, BE, BEAD, BED, DAD}
Output: BE, BEAD
Not in the output: BAD (diagonal move), DAD (uses bottom-right coordinate twice).
Note that in a real scenario, the grid size would be ~15x15, and the dictionary size would be ~10,000.
Typical: recruiter call, 2 technicals, final behavioral. Know how to be collaborative and quick. The coding rounds aren’t always traditional leetcode so know how to write clean, structured code (deisgn problems on LC with intentional solutions will help).
Overall, the process was fairly typical. It started with an initial phone screen, followed by back-to-back technical interviews that focused on problem-solving and core concepts, and concluded with a conversation with the hiring manager to discuss experience, team fit, and expectations for the role.
Just a few technicals and HM round which involves a project deep dive and behavioural section, LC was med-hard in difficulty roughly. Make sure to do LC tagged for the best chances
