Databricks Forward Deployed Engineer Interview Experiences

I got an offer for Databricks FDE, and the loop felt very structured but also pretty different from a normal SWE interview. Mine was fully remote, and the stages were recruiter, a rapid-fire technical screen, a separate practical coding round, a decomp round, and then leadership. The coding itself was not absurd LeetCode, which I appreciated. The most important round was decomp, where I had to treat the interviewer almost like a client and clarify stakeholder, scope, and KPI before touching architecture. The whole process felt like they were testing whether I could own an end-to-end enterprise solution fast.

• Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision quickly.
• Design a system to improve traffic in NYC.
• Tell me about a client-facing experience.