I recently had given DataBricks interview but unfortunately couldn't make it but just wanted to help the communiy so writting my experience . HR reached out to me for one of their roles , first they had a 15 min call discussion where they discuss about your current roles and tries to understand if you are fit to the role , once they are convinced then they send your CV to the Hiring Manager for further shortlisting.
In my case my CV was shortlisted so first had Hiring Manager round for 45 min they scheduled for 30 min but the discussion went for 45 minutes. In that discussion he first asked me about my current project and how it works , what challenges I faced and then given me a LLD problem of Parking lot to solve where he has some set of clear requirements and I just need to write classes i.e class diagram, i was able to write the class diagram for it and he was quite convinced .
After that I got selected in that round and then he told me in the same round that i will be have 2 technical rounds and after which 1 Director round and then HR discussion will happen.
In technical round 1 , they give a take home assignment problem which was for implementation of a weather forecast api and integrating it with your application , they were looking into i think in python but i wrote in Java , not sure that might be a criteria but i asked to the guy if they have any issue in doing it in java , I have completed that assignment in 5 days and was able to submit the code link by uploading in giithub and the day my technical 2 was scheduled.
In technical round 2 , they asked me 3 questions:
- Find peak element in a mountain array -- was able to write binary search and was able to run all their test cases which they wanted to run.
- After that comes the followup on the same problem, where they asked me to find the length of the longest peak in an array where there can be multiple peak elements and there can also be plateaus also i.e
say if u have input like [1 2 3 3 4 5 4 3 6 4 2 1] so here there are 2 peaks i.e 5 at index 5, and 6 which is at index 8, and the length of the longest peak is 5 which is 3 6 4 2 1. For this I got confused first with the question only and finally when I understood i was able to give brute force solution but i think it was wrong.
After that they swicthed to a HLD design problem :
Design a Real time messaging app
whatsapp or slack kind of a system and they also asked to handle for both user and group level messages
for this i was able to answer it starting from estimating the amount of data required , then showing the requirement of idempotency of the system which makes it consistent and how the server can remain consistent with messages and then finally using kafka to send messages in real time to which interviewer looked quite convinced.
I think the overall interview experience was quite good , i think due to followup question , where my approach seems incorrect , due to that i may be rejected otherwise overall it was good.
Would be graet if some one can tell as how can we solve the followup question can be solved as I couldn't solve that and couldn't find also anywhere in google .