Databricks system design interview
Round 7 of 8 · 20 questions reported
- Length
- 60 min
- Format
- Design discussion, often written in a Google Doc rather than on a whiteboard
- They grade
- Depth as the interviewer keeps extending the problem
- Heads-up
- Smaller and more concrete than at most big tech companies: API, schema, workflow, failure handling and a few scaling and concurrency choices.
Questions Databricks asks in this round 20
- Design a book price aggregatorAug 2026 · often
- Design a Slack-like chat systemSep 2026 · sometimes
- Design a single-node in-memory cache with a write-ahead logJul 2026 · sometimes
- Design a harmful content detection systemAug 2026 · rarely
- Design a collaboratively edited playlistJul 2026 · rarely
- Design the metadata service of a strongly consistent distributed file systemMay 2026 · once
- Design an order relay service in front of a broker APIApr 2026 · once
- Design a distributed job schedulerApr 2026 · once
- Design a rate limiterNov 2025 · once
- Design an ad marketplace between publishers and advertisersNov 2025 · once
- Design a payment systemOct 2025 · once
- Design UberPossibly retired · once
- Design a distributed web crawler
- Design a GPU scheduling platform
- Design a Kafka-like distributed message queue
- Design a RAG system over company docs
- Design a stock trading platform
- Design a VM bandwidth rate limiter
- Design an S3-like object storage system
- Design Dropbox
About the Databricks system design round
What does Databricks ask in the system design round?
The most asked: Design a book price aggregator, Design a Slack-like chat system and Design a single-node in-memory cache with a write-ahead log. 20 questions reported in all.
How long is the Databricks system design round?
About 60 minutes.
What is the Databricks system design round like?
Design discussion, often written in a Google Doc rather than on a whiteboard. They grade: Depth as the interviewer keeps extending the problem.