Inside My Challenging Software Engineer Interview at Databricks: Concurrency & Coding

databricks | Software Engineer | Interview Experience

Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Fail
Difficulty: Neutral to Hard

Interview Process

The interview consisted of four rounds. The first coding round involved a variation of a LeetCode problem, but the details are not well-remembered. The second round focused on system design, where the interviewer asked about implementing ConcurrentHashMap locks to support multithreading and discussed why HashMap is not thread-safe. This round was tricky, with the interviewer providing a lot of information that distracted from the core problem, resulting in limited time to write code.

Technical Questions

  1. Design a thread-safe ConcurrentHashMap class. (data structure, concurrency, threading, locking)
  2. Implement compression and decompression functions. (compression algorithm, RLE, Bit-Packing)

Tips & Insights

Be prepared for tricky questions and ensure to focus on the core problem during system design discussions. Time management is crucial, especially when dealing with complex topics.