real interview stories, told over a cup of tea ♡
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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3935 results
- The Voleon Group Software Engineer interview: medium LeetCode-style screenThe Voleon Group · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
My interview process felt surprisingly smooth compared with what I've experienced elsewhere. After a straightforward recruiter-to-technical flow, I could use a portal to track my progress through the stages. That made the process feel organized instead of stressful. The technical screen was fairly standard: a LeetCode-style problem in the medium range. The engineering interviewers were generally…
- Three OA Questions, Stuck on a Grid-Search TimeoutUpstart · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
There were three questions in total, and two of them hadn't shown up in any interview reports before. Given a list of coordinates (x, y), find the min x, min y, max_x - min_x, and max_y - min_y. The problem statement was basically: filter out (name, score) pairs where the score is above a threshold, keep everything below the threshold, then find the max score among what's left and return its name…
- Three OAs, a Block-Mining Coding Round, and Two AI-Assisted RoundsCoinbase · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
I heard Coinbase had layoffs today. Not sure how that'll affect hiring. Sigh, hope everyone's okay. The people I dealt with, including HR, were all really nice. Sharing my previous interview experience — the whole process. HR reached out asking if I wanted to interview with Coinbase (I'd applied 4 years ago but never went further in the process — they might still have had my info), so I went ahea…
- Three Onsite Rounds and the Fastest Feedback I've SeenRippling · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Offer
I'm giving back to the forum. It took me 6 months of searching, but I finally landed an offer. I have 3 years of experience and interviewed for an SDE II role. Recruiter Pretty standard: why are you looking for a new opportunity, why Rippling, an introduction to the company, and then questions about sponsorship needs. Coding For the coding round, you can choose to use AI or write the code by hand…
- Three Onsite Rounds, Strong Self-Reviews, Still No MatchRobinhood · Frontend Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
Three onsite rounds: Coding — Weekly Calendar Write a 7-day weekly calendar live, with columns as time (1-hour intervals) and rows as days. Clicking a cell pops up a dialog to create an event name. They give you a mockup. I wrote two pieces of state — a 2D grid and an events list — and did a transformation to derive the grid from the events. I felt like I wrote it so-so. The interviewer told me d…
- Three Onsite Rounds, Then GhostedBytedance · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026No response
Sharing my full TikTok/ByteDance (TT) loop. I interviewed at the 2-2 level. Round 1 was coding: Word Search II, with a tech lead — probably a 3-1 or 3-2. The experience was good, no different from a big-tech interview, and his English was good too. The call software had a built-in coding pad. I nailed it with a trie, ran it to test it, no problems. I don't think they have a fixed question bank fo…
- Three Rounds Ending in a Deep C++ Concurrency GrillChicago Trading Company · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
Round 1: Dual Behavioral Interview — Communication & Continuous Improvement Round 2: C++ Data Structures & Algorithms Question 1 Simple Moving Average (Sliding Window) Implement a class that computes the Simple Moving Average (SMA) over a fixed-size sliding window. The class should support the following APIs: Requirements: The constructor takes the window size N. Calling add(int sample) inserts a…
- Trexquant Investment Quantitative Analyst, medium LeetCode-style technical screenTrexquant Investment · Quantitative Analyst · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
About a week after the recruiter call, I had a technical screen. We went through my resume, then I solved a medium LeetCode-style coding problem. It felt like a straightforward test of whether I could turn my background into clean, working code. I eventually reached the next step, which sounded like it was leading toward a superday. I hadn't completed the onsite portion yet, so the process stoppe…
- Tricky IDE Quirks and a Surprise Chess Game System DesignOpenAI · Backend Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
Let me start by saying you should try to avoid this interviewer if you can. He had a really heavy accent and I couldn't understand him at all, and when I asked questions partway through the interview, he just kept going silent. The question was the IP address problem. I got to the third part, the CIDR block part, but when I ran it the answer was wrong. After the interview ended I thought about it…
- Twitch Software Engineer interview with a CodeSignal design and debugging assessmentTwitch · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
I applied to Twitch for a Software Engineer role, completed an assessment focused on design and debugging tasks, and then didn't move forward. The OA was a CodeSignal-style assessment with a system-design-and-coding prompt split into two parts. First, I had to implement classes and functions. Then I had to debug a helper class. I didn't hear back after the assessment. My takeaway was that the "de…
- Twitch Software Engineer interview with an unexpected behavioral callTwitch · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026Rejected
I went through Twitch's early pipeline for a Software Engineer role, starting with a Codesignal pre-screen to earn an invitation. The behavioral intro call caught me off guard, and I didn't progress. The Codesignal pre-screen was a coding assessment. The intro and recruiter call focused on behavioral questions I hadn't expected, and I felt that my answers weren't strong. I didn't advance. My take…
- Two Back-to-Back Virtual Onsite RoundsAmazon · Data Scientist · Intern · Onsite · Apr 2026In progress
This interview was purely a case of getting lucky. I got the interview invite on 4/12, then had two VO (virtual onsite) rounds back to back on 4/22, with no break in between. Both interviewers held PhDs. VO1 Standard LP (Leadership Principles) questions, and then they dug into a lot of detail based on my answers. Tell me about a most recent project Calculated risk A time you needed to extend a de…
- Two CodeSignal Rounds, Ran Out of Time on the DP QuestionMistral AI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
French AI company, the interviewers all seemed to be based in France, but the position itself is in NYC, and the recruiter is on the US side too. I talked with the hiring manager for half an hour, then moved into the phone interview stage. Two phone interview rounds: coding + system design, both done on CodeSignal. Overall I felt the bar was pretty high. Coding Three questions total. The first tw…
- Two Easy Rounds, Then a Camera-Off Grilling in ChineseBytedance · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
ByteDance's recruiter scheduled my interviews one round at a time, and never told me in advance what any round would actually cover — I only ever found out the time and length of the next round. Round 1: The interviewer was based in the Bay Area. He gave me a problem about the longest subarray of consecutive 1s — a sliding window problem I solved in seconds — with a follow-up on the 2D version. I…
- Two OA Questions in 90 MinutesUber · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
90 minutes, two questions. Question 1: Balanced Numbers You're given a permutation array of 1 to N. For each length k from 1 to N, determine whether the k elements in the permutation whose values fall in the range 1 to k are exactly contiguous in the original array. Return a string of '1' and '0' indicating whether each k satisfies the condition. Question 2: Minimum Reversal You're given a direct…
- Two Onsite Rounds, a Cross-Country Flight, and a Wait for Team MatchGoogle · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Apr 2026In progress
My R1 report is here. On Friday I finally did the R1 BQ that had gotten postponed earlier, and then HR reached out on Monday to schedule R2. I flew in from the Midwest to Mountain View, and after finishing R2, flew straight back — I was exhausted. Interview 1 Given an array representing a gold chain, where each number is the weight of one link. You need to remove one link, reconnect the chain, an…
- Two Phone Screens and an Inexplicable RejectionMeta · Site Reliability Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
Two phone screens for Meta PE (the SRE-equivalent role there), 45 minutes each. Round 1, System (full-loop troubleshooting): same prompt as another thread posted on this forum, but the interviewer didn't seem to have a specific answer in mind. They asked a bunch of pretty open-ended things — how do you make sure everything keeps running smoothly during the days you're on call? If something breaks…
- Two Phone Screens, Five Virtual Onsites, and a Company Going All-In on FDEAmperity · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026
I don't think anyone's posted about this company here — it's probably too small to be on anyone's radar. The pay HR quoted wasn't great either. Phone Screen 1 Coding: given a width and height, draw a rectangle in ASCII, with different characters for the border and the interior. Second part: draw a series of rectangles on one canvas, and handle overlap plus rectangles that go outside the canvas. I…
- Two Phone Screens, One 40-Minute t-digest DerivationExa · Research Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
Haven't seen anyone share about this company on the forum, so let me be the first to post. Research Engineer — two phone screens total. Round 1: Mostly a PyTorch contrastive loss debugging exercise. Basically just fixing some matmul shape mismatches. Once I got it working, there were no more issues. The interviewer was a young guy, really nice, and he even guided me toward the right direction. Ac…
- Two Rounds, an LRU Cache, and a Cold InterviewerTikTok · Backend Software Engineer · Intern · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
Overall, the entire interview process was okay and was not difficult, but I was very disappointed with the second-round interviewer. From beginning to end, that interviewer had a cold attitude, was not very willing to help, and asked questions that were not very clear. I heard that interviewers at TikTok are assigned randomly, so if you are unlucky, you can end up with a poor interviewer. The fir…
- Two Same-Day Screens Then SilenceSquare · Staff Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Apr 2026No response
Giving back to the forum. I interviewed for a Staff SWE role at Cash App — two technical screens back to back on the same day (one coding, one called an "AI Native" screen), then a separate HM phone screen later. All three were remote. Coding: 60 min, CoderPad AI Native: 30 min HM phone screen: 30 min It's been almost two weeks since I finished and I haven't heard anything — I'm guessing the posi…
- Two System Designs and an Unexpected RejectionGimlet Labs · Member of Technical Staff, ML Systems · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
This is an inference startup. The basic business is to place different stages of inference on different hardware in a forward-deployed model. For example, a company might have many old accelerator cards that no longer have enough compute for other work and use them for decoding. The role was Member of Technical Staff in machine learning systems. A recruiter approached me. I was already changing j…
- Two Verbal Technical Screens, No Test CasesHudson River Trading · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
Both rounds were the interviewer dictating the problem out loud, so I had to take notes — miss one parameter and you're in trouble. Round 1: a one-dimensional array, N players walking to the right. A watcher starts at an initial position and watches the players. A player being watched can't move. The watcher switches direction according to a given list of timestamps. Given a termination time T, f…
- URL Maze BFS Problem, Rejected Over a Debugging MissRamp · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
The question was the "URL maze, find the exit" problem that's already known on this forum. Right from the start we were just talking through it, testing the URL, then I wrote the program, and finally wrote a BFS solution that passed. The follow-up: they swapped in a different URL and had me run my Part 1 solution against it, and this time it didn't pass — I needed to handle status codes like 503…
- Vanta Account Executive interview with principles discussion and mock cold callVanta · Account Executive · HR Screen · Apr 2026
After a recruiter screen, I was set up to meet the hiring manager. The next steps focused on the company’s principles and ended with a mock cold call. Even at that stage, it was clear what they wanted to evaluate: how I would think through the principles and how I would perform in a sales conversation. I didn’t receive an offer, but the process felt straightforward while it was underway. Location…
- Vanta Account Executive interview: missed rounds and a generic rejection emailVanta · Account Executive · HR Screen · Apr 2026
The recruiter stage set a bad tone for me. The process began with a recruiter screening, and everything afterward felt chaotic. The recruiter seemed disoriented and moved between two different recruiters before returning to the original person. Scheduling kept changing too. Meetings were rescheduled at the last minute, and the recruiter eventually joined the call late. More interviews were then s…
- Vanta Software Engineer interview with 5 of 6 OA questions correctVanta · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026Rejected
I passed the resume screen and immediately received an online assessment. I answered 5 of the 6 questions correctly, covering arrays, hashmaps, and matrix or grid problems. After that, I was invited to a one-hour technical interview in a LeetCode-style format. They sent an interview prep guide beforehand, and I liked that it emphasized mapping out the solution before writing code. The interview f…
- Vanta Software Engineer interview with a 4-of-6 online assessmentVanta · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026Rejected
I passed the resume screen and then took an online assessment, but my process ended there. I got 4 out of 6 questions correct and was partially correct on a fifth. The problems were mostly about arrays, along with two-pointer problems and two grid-based questions. The test made it clear what they were evaluating, and I didn't score well enough to move on. The process didn't stretch across multipl…
- Vanta Software Engineer interview: two technical rounds and one behavioralVanta · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
My process started with an online assessment, followed by a recruiter call and a standard technical process that became a virtual onsite. The onsite had two technical rounds and one behavioral round. Overall, it felt fairly professional and organized. What I remember most was how high the bar seemed for moving forward. The formats were conventional, but the interviewers appeared strict about what…
- Voleon Data Scientist interview with a below-market offerVoleon · Data Scientist · Apr 2026Offer
My experience was shaped less by the technical interviews than by compensation. The process was organized and pleasant, and I genuinely liked the people I met. The rounds covered data science work and included technical as well as people-oriented discussions, including expectations around team or people management. The pay was the part that landed poorly. After going through multiple interviews a…
