Sharing my experience because there's almost nothing specific out there for frontend at Databricks. Most interview content assumes you're going for backend or data engineering. It's a different loop.
Context: I have 4 years of experience, mostly React and TypeScript, with some design system work. Applied for a mid-level FE role on their notebooks UI team.
Recruiter screen: Very quick, 20 minutes. They mentioned Databricks is investing heavily in the UI layer because their product has historically been backend-first and they're trying to close the UX gap. That was actually encouraging to hear.
Technical phone screen (45 min): One JavaScript/TypeScript problem. Nothing tricky, it was a functional programming question involving array transformations. Clean solution mattered more than clever solution. No trick, no "gotcha." I wrote it in TS with types and the interviewer seemed to appreciate that I didn't just write untyped JS.
Onsite (4 rounds):
Coding: Two rounds. One was standard algorithm (nothing exotic, medium on LeetCode scale), one was specifically UI-focused: implement a feature with given an HTML skeleton and some event handling. They care about handling edge cases, accessibility basics, and whether you can reason about component state without a framework.
System design: I was asked to design a real-time collaborative editing surface. Think Google Docs-lite. They were much more interested in how you handle conflict resolution and latency than in drawing boxes. I brought up CRDTs briefly (didn't need to go deep) and operational transforms and that opened a good conversation.
Behavioral: Two behavioral questions. "Tell me about a time you pushed back on a design decision that you thought would hurt users." and "How do you build relationships with design and PM when you're the only frontend engineer on a cross-functional squad?" Both super relevant to the role.
Timeline: onsite to verbal offer was 9 days. They moved fast once they decided.
If you're a frontend person applying here: know that they actually care about frontend craft. Brush up on browser rendering, CSS-in-JS trade-offs, and state management patterns. The fact that they're building an IDE-like product means performance and interaction detail really matter.