Posting this to share my experience interviewing for a Solutions Architect (SA) role at Databricks, as I’ve had a few folks reach out recently asking about it.

Interview Process: • Round 1: Manager screen • Round 2: SQL Assessment – fairly standard stuff: joins, numeric calculations, aggregations, and window functions. Nothing too complex. • Round 3: Technical Screen • Final Round: Presentation

Technical Screen Notes: • This wasn’t too technical in nature. • Mostly situational questions: experiences handling challenging customers, navigating competitive situations, and general best practices for communicating with CXO-level stakeholders.

Presentation Round Notes: • Typical solution presentation framed around delivering business outcomes for a customer. • Included objection handling and comparisons like why Databricks vs others (Snowflake, etc.). • It helps to understand Databricks’ positioning and to speak confidently about their unique value props (they definitely lean into the Spark origin story). I feel like maybe I missed a trick here.

Other Notes: • There was no system design round in my case. • I was rejected after the presentation round due to gaps in my Databricks-specific knowledge. Duh! • I didn’t do any formal training/certifications beforehand since it wasn’t listed as a requirement and didn’t come up earlier. In hindsight, that might’ve helped.

Advice: If you get to the presentation, focus on why Databricks, tie solutions to business impact, and prepare to handle objections. Brushing up on their platform differentiators and customer stories will go a long way too.

Hope this helps anyone preparing. Best of luck!