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Apple Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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39 results
- Java-Only CoderPad Screen With a Progressive Store-Hours ProblemApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
I'm definitely done for after today's interview, no need to even think about it. I'm sharing my experience, and I'd also like everyone to help me critique it. The interviewer didn't introduce himself and there was no BQ. He just told me to open CoderPad and start writing a problem. The problem was progressive, and I could only use Java. It wasn't hard at all. There's a store, you're given an open…
- Exploring Employee and Audit Tables with the Hiring ManagerApple · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
It was a team focused more on internal work. The first round was a technical interview with the hiring manager, and we started solving problems with almost no self-introduction. I have to say Apple's questions were very detailed. It really felt like they were testing technical ability through the work you normally do. I needed to think aloud; they cared a lot about how I understood the data and e…
- Great Feedback Despite Fumbling C++ TriviaApple · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I mass-applied online, and 3 days later a recruiter picked me up; the team I was interviewing with was a pretty good match. The first round went straight into a tech interview. I started with a self-introduction and a brief chat about my resume, no very technical questions there. Then it moved into coding. No algorithms - they used their own custom question, and I was allowed to use AI. Basically…
- One Hiring Manager Round on Terraform Provisioning, Then a RejectionApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The first round was a 55-minute interview. From my own digging before the interview, I figured out that the person interviewing me was the Hiring Manager. The first half was just chatting with them. Every Apple interview I've done so far has been like this. The last 20-some minutes were some high-level design questions. This team does management and maintenance of infra, and the question was very…
- Phone Screen Rejection After a Bug-Free LRUApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
AES team. The role was posted by someone on the forum (I don't know whether they were the hiring manager), but I applied on my own, and the recruiter reached out very quickly. The phone screen was with one interviewer. For the first thirty minutes it was behavioral questions plus a project deep dive, and I got affirmed on all sorts of things. After that came LRU, bug free, and it ran with the rig…
- Resume Deep Dive, Then a Plant-Poisoning Grid ProblemApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
I think the team was TV. It was supposed to be a hiring manager round with one interviewer, but a different interviewer joined instead. He said we would be writing code, but then he suddenly started a deep dive into my resume and we talked for 20 minutes. Then he moved on to the problem, which was either whatever "Jiujiusi" is or plant poisoning. 0 is healthy and 1 is poisoned. If a healthy cell…
- Straight-to-Code Phone Screen, Multi-Family Unit Conversion Graph in JavaApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
I had prepped for a resume deep dive or BQ, but the moment it started, without a word, we went straight into the problem. It's been a long time since I had such a pure interview. It was a variant of LC 3535 (unit conversion), which I'd also seen in an earlier interview report. The difference is that there's more than one family of unit conversions, e.g. temperature is one series and length is ano…
- Designing a 200TB Media Data Transfer PipelineApple · AI/ML Full Stack Engineer · Other · Aug 2026
Question Background The interviewer threw out a fairly open-ended system-design / data-engineering question: You have 200TB of media data (images/videos) that needs to be transferred to compute hosts / a compute cluster for processing (preprocessing, inference, training). How would you design this? There's no standard answer to this one. What it's actually testing is: can you pin down the scope o…
- Same-Day RejectionApple · Machine Learning Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
The team is under iCloud and mainly works on time series and operations research optimization. The first round was a resume deep dive with the hiring manager. They asked how to decide which cloud storage tier to use for a user's files, such as AWS S3 versus AWS S3 Glacier, since different tiers have different costs. It was essentially a classification problem: predicting those files' access proba…
- Three Phone Rounds, Three Virtual Onsite Rounds, RejectedApple · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
This was my first time interviewing for an Apple SDE role, and it was for compute infra. Overall the experience was bad: three phone rounds, then three virtual onsite rounds. Apple hires by team, and every team has its own interview style. My team did phone interviews one round at a time, and you only got the next round if you passed the previous one. Round 1: OS and networking fundamentals plus…
- Two Phone Screens Then a Four-Round OnsiteApple · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Phone Screen 1: Coding — Implement Hit Counter Implement a Hit Counter that records the time of each request and can query how many hits happened in the last 5 minutes, i.e. within 300 seconds. Main interface: hit(timestamp) records a request getHits(timestamp) returns the number of requests in the past 300 seconds You can use a queue, or a circular buffer aggregated by second. The focus is on ho…
- Virtual Onsite with Top-K URLs Design, HTML Parser and LRU CacheApple · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
System design: Top-K trending URLs Design a system that surfaces the top K most-visited URLs over a time window. Clarify first: the window (last hour vs. last 24h), how fresh results need to be, exact vs. approximate counts, and read vs. write volume. Ingestion: click or visit events go to a stream (Kafka), partitioned by URL hash. Counting: stream processors keep per-URL counts in tumbling or sl…
- Apple Machine Learning Engineer interview: smooth and rushed flowsApple · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026Offer
My smoother interviews began with a technical phone screen, then a comfortable, practical DSA-style round. It included a regression-model critique and a subset-sum-style problem. I had recently worked through similar problems, so those patterns were already familiar. I then had a codebase-style evaluation around PDF evaluation logic. The structure felt familiar because I had previously reviewed t…
- Apple Software Engineer interview with a full-day final round of eight conversationsApple · Software Engineer · Jul 2026
The interview cycle was organized but intense. I had four rounds overall, and the final one was a full day with around eight separate interviews running back to back. There were a lot of technical and behavioral questions, and the main demand was sustained focus. Before that full-day round, I had conversations about my background and projects. They started with my CV, then moved into targeted tec…
- Apple Software Engineer interview: CMOS logic and architecture reasoningApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
After a recruiter chat, I moved through structured rounds that felt focused and practical. The first round asked me to explain core flow stages end to end, tying each stage's inputs to its purpose. The questions soon became more specific, including level shifting, isolation cells, and how CMOS logic works for an inverter. The virtual onsite was about how I approached an engineering problem, not j…
- Apple Software Engineer interview: design challenge decisionApple · Software Engineer · Other · Jul 2026Rejected
HR outreach quickly led to an hour-long hiring-manager conversation about my background, technical topics, and design. I did not feel especially strong in those answers, but I still advanced to a design challenge. The cycle ended after I submitted that work. I was rejected after the design challenge, without a long back-and-forth. What surprised me was how quickly the process moved from conversat…
- Apple Software Engineer interview: onsite assignment and presentationApple · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2026Rejected
Recruiter outreach moved quickly into a multi-step process that felt smooth even though it was complex. I went through several rounds with different interviewers, each focused on how I would operate in the role rather than on curveballs. The HR touchpoints clearly explained what each stage would test. I had an onsite-style experience with an assignment and a presentation at the end, which made th…
- Apple Software Engineer interview: technical depth and uncomfortable toneApple · Software Engineer · Other · Jul 2026
The overall cycle was technically heavy and thorough. I had multiple rounds with mostly professional, fair questions about heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics. I was expected to show understanding even when the questions became specific. Two rounds felt different. Those interviewers kept adding follow-ups until they found something I could not answer, and some questions required de…
- Apple Software Engineer interview: timing, circuits, and coding under pressureApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026Offer
The process was long and kept expanding. I had multiple roughly one-hour interviews, and the volume itself made it intense. Technical questions covered setup and hold timing, transistor and diode behavior, logic reasoning, and at least one coding round with medium LeetCode-style problems such as string compression and an LRU cache. The mix of coding and hardware-timing questions tested both reaso…
- Apple Software Engineer interview: verification and timing closureApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
The process began with a short phone call where I was walked through the overall structure. The later rounds centered on my resume and projects, then moved straight into hardware verification and design. The technical range ran from basic material to SVA constraints, UVM, and handshake-style interactions. A later round was even more focused on code and timing logic. We covered DFT fundamentals, e…
- React JS and Java Coding RoundsApple · Full Stack Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
React JS Coding Round In incognito mode, if you open a site like Amazon.com or Flipkart.com, what are some ways to optimize the page's load speed? Is JavaScript single-threaded or multi-threaded? What is the event loop? Does JS execute top to bottom, or the other way around? If you fetch 10M records via an API in JS and render them in a table in the UI, what problems show up in the UI? How would…
- Remote K8s Role, Passed Two Screens Then Bumped for an Internal TransferApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026No response
Screening: I had to hand-write a consistent hashing ring from scratch; then K8s questions, like where do you start when a pod has a problem; and finding a bug in some Terraform. The result came back on the spot, and half an hour later the recruiter replied to schedule the phone screen. All I can say is, fast. Phone screen: they gave me skeleton code for a union find and I had to fill it in. Then…
- Two Phone Screens, Easy Coding Then a Distributed Cache DesignApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
This was for ASE, on the storage infra team. Phone screen round 1: the HM, 45 mins. BQ Coding 1: string run-length decoding. For example, a5b3c -> aaaaabbbc Coding 2: count the nodes in a chain. Each node can only access the node to its left and the node to its right, and you have to count how many nodes there are in total. Both problems needed test cases. Summary: the coding questions were very…
- Six Onsite Rounds That Felt Like Six Different CompaniesApple · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jun 2026
Six rounds, written for people as confused as I was. One thing I only understood after the whole process: this company hires by team, so each team sets its own bar and writes its own questions — which means whatever interview experience you find here for this company might be less useful than you'd hope. Over my six rounds, the six interviewers were different enough in style that it felt like six…
- A Reorganization Delay and Onsite RejectionApple · Accessories Software QA Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Mar 2026Rejected
In the first interview, I talked with HR about the role being in San Diego and confirmed that the role would sponsor my OPT. In the second interview, I talked with the hiring manager about my previous QA projects. [I'd done a year as a QA intern and had basically done all the full-time work once already.] Then I was ghosted for three weeks. After that, they called me back and said a reorganizatio…
- Accessories Team and a Final Coding RejectionApple · Software QA Engineer · Onsite · Mar 2026Rejected
HR phone screen: Some questions about my immigration status. They pointed out that the job had to be onsite in San Diego, though the interviews could take place in Cupertino. The second round was with the hiring manager. We discussed my current work and projects, then my previous QA experience: benchmarking and regression, reducing the false-failure rate, optimizing HPC resource usage, and reduci…
- Setting a Retry Threshold to Save iPhone BatteryApple · Research Scientist · Onsite · Mar 2026Rejected
I recently interviewed for a Research Scientist role at Apple, on a team that works on battery power. Here's the question they asked. The team's core mission is optimizing iPhone battery life and power usage. They found that when users are on Apple Music, they often hit network fluctuations where the app can't get the audio data. At that point the system faces a choice: The disconnect could be a…
- Four SystemVerilog Rounds and a Fast Offer (Plus a Google DV Rejection)Apple · Design Verification Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Offer
Apple Timeline: 2/10 – Went to my school's Apple Intern Networking Event, chatted with the hiring manager for a bit, and got a same-day 30-minute interview that afternoon. 2/11 – HR reached out with a positive signal and scheduled three more rounds (back to back, though one got rescheduled). 2/16, 2/19 – Interviews. 2/24 – Followed up by email; HR said they were still syncing. 2/27 – Offer call.…
- A 45-Minute Technical Screen on Synchronizers and PPAApple · Technical Screen · Dec 2025
45 minutes total. It started with introducing the work on my resume — I talked about an IP block I designed myself. While I was talking he kept nodding, and I thought the first round was going pretty smoothly. Then he started asking some technical questions. Since I mentioned different synchronizers partway through, he asked why you'd use different synchronizers (2-stage FF, edge detect, async FI…
- Two Tech Screens, No Feedback on the RejectApple · Machine Learning Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Dec 2025Rejected
One day out of nowhere I got an email from an Apple recruiter about an open position. Since the opportunity was there, I figured I'd interview and see how it went. First round was directly with the hiring manager — we started by chatting through my resume. The team does RAG work, and it's basically an internal group that supports the hardware team as helpers. In the last 20 minutes, they opened u…
