SWE / MLE Behavioral Round

Requirements

Craft clear, detailed responses for the following prompts:

• Outline your current role and your reasons for wanting to join Databricks.
• Share the project you’re most proud of, highlighting your personal contribution.
• Describe a time a project was delayed, how you managed the situation, and what improvements followed.
• Recount an instance where you disagreed with feedback, and explain how you handled it.
• Discuss a technical disagreement you had with a teammate, along with how it got resolved.
• Talk about a difficult problem the team faced and the steps you took to address it.
• Provide an example of working across functions, and describe how you got everyone aligned.
• Describe an unforeseen on-call incident, how you dealt with the surprise, and how you orchestrated the response.

Notes

This round evaluates motivation, ownership, openness to feedback, technical conflict resolution, and cross-functional decision-making. Make the project context specific enough so the interviewer can tell your personal contribution apart from the group effort.

Preparation

• Create a 90-second STAR outline for every prompt; note the situation, your specific action, the result, and the lesson you took away.
• Practice your answers for the proud-project, delay, and technical-disagreement prompts out loud, and cut any phrasing that hides your individual role or how the disagreement was settled.
• Compose a single sentence describing how feedback you initially rejected changed your subsequent actions, and rehearse saying it without placing blame on anyone else.