RejectedTechnical Screen

Phone Screen Failed on a Fault Tolerant Queue and a Typing Race Design

OpenAISoftware Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026

I had two phone screen rounds, one coding and one design. The coding round was a fault tolerant queue. I had to implement enqueue, reserve, fail, and a DLQ, and there were 7 unit tests that all had to pass. Part 2 added task dependencies. Each task comes with a cooldown after it gets preempted, and you have to use the preempt timestamp to work out yourself when the cooldown ends. Also, when a tas…

Shared by a candidate · reported Oct 2026. Interview formats change; use it as a guide, not a script.