Databricks interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Databricks software engineering interview across 4 levels and 17 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Databricks salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Engineering Intern (Summer)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 1 HR · Recommended prep: 2-3 months · Cooldown: Not reported; campus drive runs annually per CDC placement c

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (CodeSignal)

    Assessment · ~70-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · CodeSignal

    Sample question: Design Tic-Tac-Toe — Design a Tic-Tac-Toe game on an n x n board for two players. Implement move(row, col, player) that returns the winning player as soon as a player completes any full row, column, or diagonal, otherwise 0. Aim for O(1) time per move using per-row, per-column, and two diagonal running counters. Databricks commonly asks the variable-sized (N x N, win-line = N) variant.

  2. Round 1: Technical / Coding Interview 1 (live)

    Onsite · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live interview · CoderPad

    Sample question: IP to CIDR — Given a starting IP address (a.b.c.d) and an integer n, return the shortest list of CIDR blocks that exactly covers the range of n consecutive IPs starting at the given address. At each step take the largest power-of-two block that both aligns with the current address (bounded by its lowest set bit) and does not exceed the remaining count.

  3. Round 2: Technical / Coding Interview 2 (live)

    Onsite · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: House Robber — Given an array of non-negative integers representing money in houses along a street, return the maximum amount you can rob without robbing two adjacent houses. Solve in O(n) time and O(1) space with the classic take/skip recurrence.

  4. Round 3: HR / Technical Fit Round

    Behavioral · ~30-45 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Software Engineer / New Grad (L3–L4), Bengaluru

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4–8 weeks · Recommended prep: 8–12 weeks · Cooldown: 6–12 month

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / HR phone screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical screen — live coding OR online assessment

    Assessment · ~70 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: House Robber — Given an integer array nums where nums[i] is the money in house i, return the maximum amount you can rob without robbing two adjacent houses. Reported Databricks follow-ups: circular street (House Robber II) and skip-at-least-k houses.

  3. Round 2: Virtual onsite loop

    Onsite · 4–5 hours · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  4. Round 3: Hiring committee + reference checks + offer

    Offer · 1 week · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Offer discussion

Senior Software Engineer (L5), Bengaluru

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4–8 weeks · Recommended prep: 10–12 weeks · Cooldown: 6–12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical phone screen (live coding)

    Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Design Bounded Blocking Queue — Implement a thread-safe bounded blocking queue with fixed capacity: enqueue(x) blocks while full, dequeue() blocks while empty, size() returns the current count. Producer and consumer threads must be correctly synchronized with locks and condition variables. This is Databricks' signature concurrency/multithreading round (also posed as a producer/consumer thread pool or an efficient message-queue logger).

  3. Round 2: Hiring manager call (behavioral)

    Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  4. Round 3: Virtual onsite loop

    Onsite · 4–5 hours · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  5. Round 4: Hiring committee + reference checks + offer

    Offer · 1 week · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Offer discussion

Staff / Senior Staff Software Engineer (L6+), Bengaluru

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~5–8 weeks · Recommended prep: 10–14 weeks · Cooldown: 6–12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical / hiring-manager screen

    Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  3. Round 2: Virtual onsite loop

    Onsite · 5–6 interviews · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  4. Round 3: Hiring committee + exec approval + references + offer

    Offer · ~1 week · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Offer discussion

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Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.