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Waymo 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.
- 3935
- Experiences
- 857
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- 532
- Offers
9 results
- Rare Events, Sampling, and Probability CodingWaymo · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
A recruiter contacted me. After screening and a technical screen, I went into four interview rounds. I've made the original questions less specific for others preparing. Data Intuition, first round A new version performs significantly better in offline evaluation, in simulation, but shows no difference after going live. What could cause that? How would you model a rare event using a log form, and…
- A Simulation Design Round After a Recruiter ReassuranceWaymo · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
Coding: 317. The second problem was traversing a graph with DFS, fairly simple. There was a follow-up: come up with an algorithm to prove your answer is correct. A strange follow-up. Behavioral: Very standard. A project I'm proud of, how to handle priorities, things like that. System design: This was the first round of the interview. What a disastrous start. I was interviewing with the simulation…
- Navigation Constraints and Mapping SystemsWaymo · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jun 2026
The author lists a Waymo phone screen followed by onsite system-design and coding interviews. The screen involved a robot moving in four directions, returning to its starting point, and avoiding obstacles. The design discussion asked about a vehicle fleet collecting map information. One onsite coding task matched dictionary words against input containing repeated letters. Another used a map with…
- A Four-Round Onsite With Two System Design ProblemsWaymo · Software Engineer · Onsite · May 2026
A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. Apparently the company's valuation went up 4x earlier this year, so they've been hiring a lot lately. The onsite was four rounds total. Round 1: System Design Design a Matchmaking Service: Join matchmaking queue Cancel matchmaking request Match two compatible players Notify both players when a match is found Handle disconnects and expired requests Round…
- Rejected 30 Minutes After Pushing on the ProcessWaymo · Frontend Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · May 2026Rejected
I interviewed for a senior frontend engineer role, on the simulation team. Probably not much help to most people but in case someone needs it. Phone screen Part 1 — I don't remember the exact details, but it was related to n-ary tree recursion. Roughly, if a node's value contains a certain substring, you need to remove the entire subtree. Return the filtered tree. Part 2 was building a UI based o…
- Phone Screen Passed, Rejected After a Four-Round Virtual OnsiteWaymo · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
I got rejected after the full Waymo loop. Posting this so the people after me can avoid the same landmine. Before the interview I looked through the forum and there seemed to be hardly any Waymo reports. After finishing, I do feel there is no fixed question bank, it all depends on what the interviewer feels like asking that day. The phone screen was a variant of the number-of-islands problem, and…
- Rejected After a Rough, Disrespectful Technical ScreenWaymo · Site Reliability Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Rejected
I got rejected. This interview was for an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) role. The question was roughly this: there's a number line from 0 to 50. Points keep landing on the line, and each point contaminates the region 0.5 to its left and 0.5 to its right of where it lands — i.e., an interval of length 1. Once part of the line is contaminated, it stays contaminated forever. Points can land anywhe…
- Tripped Up by a Google-Style DSA QuestionWaymo · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026
A recruiter reached out to me. Phone screen: DFS, pretty standard. I had the next four rounds on the same day: Round 1: ML fundamentals. Pure conversation, talked about my projects and experience, and he'd find things to ask about along the way. Felt pretty smooth, the guy listened carefully and didn't interrupt randomly, very respectful. Round 2: ML coding. Based on the prep materials they gave…
- K-Means++ Miss and a Trajectory Prediction QuestionWaymo · Machine Learning Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Dec 2025Rejected
First round: We just chatted casually at the start — they asked about the project I'd worked on, how big the network was, how many parameters, how big the data was, that kind of thing. I couldn't really remember most of it. Then we moved on to coding k-means. I had to explain what k-means is first, and after I finished writing it, they asked me to write a better initialization method. They gave m…
