Prepare for your Databricks system design interview

Distributed data systems and lakehouse architecture cases calibrated to Databricks’ open-source, data-at-scale engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Databricks is looking for

System Design Interview

Distributed Data Systems Design

01Fault Tolerance & Exactly-Once

02Storage-Compute Separation

03Schema Evolution Handling

04Query Performance Optimization

Coding Interview

Technical Coding Round

01Distributed Algorithm Design

02Data Structure Selection

03Concurrency Handling

04Performance Analysis

Behavioral Interview

01Systems Thinking

02Open Source Contribution Mindset

03Data-Driven Decision Making

04Cross-Team Collaboration

Lakehouse architecture patterns//Exactly-once distributed guarantees//Open source engineering culture

Practice Library

Databricks exercises

Ready to ace your Databricks system design interview?

Prepare for your Databricks system design interview

Distributed data systems and lakehouse architecture cases calibrated to Databricks’ open-source, data-at-scale engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Databricks is looking for

System Design Interview

Distributed Data Systems Design

01Fault Tolerance & Exactly-Once

02Storage-Compute Separation

03Schema Evolution Handling

04Query Performance Optimization

Coding Interview

Technical Coding Round

01Distributed Algorithm Design

02Data Structure Selection

03Concurrency Handling

04Performance Analysis

Behavioral Interview

01Systems Thinking

02Open Source Contribution Mindset

03Data-Driven Decision Making

04Cross-Team Collaboration

Lakehouse architecture patterns//Exactly-once distributed guarantees//Open source engineering culture

How It Works

Master Databricks System Design Interviews

Distributed data systems and Delta Lake architecture cases, scored on Databricks’ engineering evaluation dimensions. · Click to expand

1Your System Design Goals

Distributed Systems Design

Practitioner

Scalability & Tradeoff Analysis

Practitioner

2System Design Case Prep

Design the Delta Lake write transaction protocol that ensures ACID guarantees when...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Databricks

3Frameworks

Framework

Has the cache hit rate degraded significantly?

Is the eviction policy causing premature key expiry?

Cache hit rate dropped from 94% to 31% over 12 minutes

LRU eviction triggered on 8 of 12 shards — max memory 92% utilized

Are hotkey collisions concentrating load on single shards?

Top 3 product SKUs drive 67% of cache reads — all hash to shard 4

Shard 4 CPU at 98% while remaining 11 shards average 31%

Is replication lag causing stale reads from replicas?

Primary-replica replication lag elevated?

Replica lag: 4.2 seconds (normal: <50ms) — reads serving stale prices

Write throughput increased 280% post Black Friday campaign launch

Is read-your-writes consistency violated for session data?

23% of checkout sessions see cart quantity revert after update

Sticky sessions disabled in load balancer 48 hours ago

Is network partitioning or node failure degrading cluster health?

Are cluster nodes experiencing partial network partitions?

2 of 12 Redis nodes reporting intermittent timeouts (AZ-3 subnet)

AZ-3 network maintenance window started 18 minutes ago

4Feedback

Distributed Systems Design

Distinctive

Scalability Reasoning

Strong

Tradeoff Quantification

Meeting Bar

Architectural Communication

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

Databricks exercises

Design the Delta Lake transaction log system that guarantees ACID compliance for...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Data & AI · System DesignDatabricks

Design a streaming ingestion pipeline for Databricks that guarantees exactly-once...

LEARNHard

Data & AI · System DesignDatabricks

Design the auto-scaling cluster manager for Databricks Runtime that allocates compute...

LEARNHard

Data & AI · System DesignDatabricks

Tell me about a time you designed a system for high-throughput data ingestion. What...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Systems ThinkingDatabricks

Describe a situation where you had to optimize a distributed system for both read and...

BEHAVIORALHard

Behavioral · Performance OptimizationDatabricks