Technical Phone Screen-The interviewer was very friendly and jumped straight into the technical part. I was asked a variation of the "Merge Intervals" problem, but with a twist involving weighted intervals where I had to maximize the weight instead of just merging them (similar to Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling).

I initially gave an O(N^2) dynamic programming solution. The interviewer gave me a hint about sorting and using binary search, which helped me optimize it to O(N log N) using memoization. We spent the last 5 minutes discussing how this approach would scale if the intervals were streaming in real-time. Overall, it went really well, and the interviewer seemed impressed with my communication. I heard back from the recruiter two days later to schedule the virtual onsite.

Tips: Focus heavily on LeetCode Mediums and Hards, especially Graphs, Trees, and Dynamic Programming. Databricks really values clean, production-ready code, so make sure to modularize your solution, name your variables well, and handle edge cases proactively without being prompted. Also, brush up on fundamental OS concepts like threading and concurrency for the system design rounds!