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
- Two Months of Team-Match Limbo, Then a 'Role Moved to Toronto' ExcuseRobinhood · Software Engineer · Onsite · Mar 2026Rejected
This has been an extremely long timeline, and even now I still don't know whether they want to reject me but can't bring themselves to say it, or whether they're just pretending it's still a team match. If any of you are at Robinhood, please help me figure this out. Thanks! Feb 11 — talked with the recruiter. Feb 19 — first technical round, they said I passed. Then another prep call with the recr…
- Two Screens and Long Decision WaitsJ.P. Morgan · Quantitative Researcher · Technical Screen · Mar 2026Rejected
The author describes two quantitative-research applications at J.P. Morgan, involving a credit team and a market/treasury risk team. Each reached one technical interview with a hiring manager. The author reports waiting several months both for interviews and for eventual rejections. The interviews required complete code written in the applicant’s own notes rather than a shared coding environment.…
- Voleon Data Scientist interview focused on live codingVoleon · Data Scientist · Mar 2026
My interview process focused heavily on live coding rather than a lot of conversational questions. The main topics were Python operations and basic statistics and probability. The way they tested me made it feel like they wanted to see how I actually manipulated data instead of hearing me discuss it abstractly. I expected straightforward technical work. The coding itself didn't feel impossible, b…
- Weak Signal on Coding 2 But the Offer Came AnywayMeta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Mar 2026Offer
I feel really lucky, I got a great recruiter. From the initial reach out all the way to finalizing the offer they were thorough about everything, kept emphasizing "I'm on your side." In the debrief they told me Coding 2 had a weak signal, but the quorum still generously let it through. The interviewers were all nice too — when I interviewed for an intern role before I ran into people who were dis…
- Whatnot Full Stack Engineer: recruiter call ended before technical depthWhatnot · Full Stack Engineer · Mar 2026Rejected
My first step was a quick recruiter call focused almost entirely on my projects. I tried to give a one-sentence summary of each team and company so I could cover my experience efficiently, but the interviewer stopped me earlier than I expected and focused on one project in more detail. The conversation ended shortly afterward, and I was declined. What bothered me was that it never went into much…
- Whatnot Software Engineer interview with a one-hour LeetCode-style roundWhatnot · Software Engineer · Mar 2026Rejected
I had a one-hour LeetCode-style round with an engineer. The interviewer was present but very quiet while I worked, so there wasn't much back-and-forth or verbal guidance. The session felt more isolated than I expected, and I ended up not moving forward. The unusual silence is what I remember most. It put more pressure on me to drive the problem-solving process on my own. Location: United States.…
- Whatnot Software Engineer interview with HireVue and KaratWhatnot · Software Engineer · Other · Mar 2026
My process started with a HireVue-style interview, followed by a Karat technical interview. The technical portion moved from easy to harder LeetCode questions, and the increase in difficulty was noticeable. After the Karat round, I had a short recruiter screening. If I passed that, I would move on to another technical interview with engineers. That phase was described as including more problem-so…
- Whatnot Software Engineer interview: four rounds and a collaborative processWhatnot · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Mar 2026
My interview loop had four rounds. It started with a technical screen focused on core software engineering skills, followed by coding, system design, and product sense rounds. The product sense round felt different from the others because it was more of a discussion than a typical question-and-answer session. The interviewers were kind and supportive throughout, and the overall tone felt collabor…
- Whatnot Software Engineer interview: one-way video with one-minute answersWhatnot · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Mar 2026
I was pulled into a short, one-way video interview. The setup was straightforward: there were several questions, and I had to answer each one on camera within a tight preparation window, with only about a minute to respond to each prompt. The questions focused on behavior and my resume, with some emphasis on why Whatnot specifically. What surprised me was how quickly everything moved. I heard bac…
- XGBoost, DP, and a Fraud-Detection System Design That Didn't LandBytedance · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Mar 2026Rejected
Interview time: February this year. Department: e-commercial team. Round 1: Self-introduction, walked through my projects. A few classic ML Q&A: Q: Why is XGBoost less prone to overfitting than a single decision tree? A: Because it's a gradient-boosting ensemble method (many weak-learner trees), it adds regularization (L1/L2, tree complexity penalties), a learning rate (shrinkage), row/column sub…
- Zipline Software Engineer interview: project deep dive and technical discussionZipline · Software Engineer · Mar 2026
My process began with straightforward introductions. The interviewer first walked me through the role description, and we then discussed my resume and portfolio in more detail. From there, the conversation shifted to technical questions. I had enough time to answer them before we returned to company-related questions that came up during the discussion. Another part of the process focused closely…
- 70-Minute CodeSignal OA with Hand-Written Bagging and Naive BayesPinterest · Machine Learning Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Feb 2026
Based in Toronto. Looks like several teams were hiring at the same time, mostly on the search/ads/recommendations side. HR reached out on LinkedIn, and after I submitted my resume and cover letter they sent me an OA. 70 minutes, 10 questions, done on CodeSignal — 6 multiple choice, 1 coding question, and 2 ML engineering questions. The multiple choice questions were mostly ML fundamentals: the de…
- 90-Minute OA, Solved Just One of Three ProblemsRubrik · Frontend Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Feb 2026
90 minutes, 3 problems. Felt like every problem was medium+ difficulty. I only managed to solve the first one, and even that had a TLE. LeetCode 2551 Given two vectors of equal length, for each index [i] there is guaranteed to be an edge between v1[i] and v2[i]. Within the same vector, earlier elements sit at a higher level and later elements sit at a lower level, and together they end up forming…
- A Brutal Four-Question SQL RoundRevolut · Data Analyst · Technical Screen · Feb 2026In progress
The recruiter call was pretty standard — they asked why I wanted to apply to Revolut, about my past experience, and then talked about how they're moving their headquarters to the UAE now, so a lot of the roles are on mainland Europe, not many in the UK. It depends on your interview results — they sponsor visas for senior and above, etc. SQL Interview Questions The SQL was actually pretty hard — f…
- A Full OA Question Bank (Oct 2025–Jan 2026)Capital One · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Feb 2026
Given a target and an array, count how many elements are greater than the target and how many are less than it. If there are more greater elements, return greater; if there are more smaller elements, return smaller; if they're equal, return tie. Given an initial state, a season, and a day, return the moon state for that specific date. The moon's cycle is 8 days with 8 possible states, and the ini…
- A HackerRank Screen With No SQL at AllBlackRock · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
After I got unlucky and was laid off from my previous company, I wiped my tears and quickly opened up LinkedIn. Turns out I should have done LeetCode before opening LinkedIn. 🐶 This company was really strange. At first a recruiter reached out to me about an interview, but when I applied on the company website I got instantly rejected. The next day the recruiter called me and said it was just a lo…
- A LinkedIn Cold Ask, a Take-Home, and a Python Debug StumbleOpenAI · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Rejected
I didn't expect to actually get an interview invite from OpenAI — I'd only asked a recruiter about it on LinkedIn. My own level isn't really there, so I went into it purely as an experience, but the experience was great, worth writing up a post-interview reflection. Some background: I do data work at a big company, and my job search has mainly focused on experimentation and causal inference. Afte…
- A Merkle Tree Diff Problem Run Inside a Real RepoCursor · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026In progress
Just finished the interview, don't know the result yet, but I feel like I answered pretty mediocre. It really was the question that's already posted here — Merkle Tree — but the details still mattered a lot. It runs inside an actual repo, so you have to read files from the repo, which means you need to be familiar with the relevant standard library. The interviewer wanted the folder structure to…
- A Next-Word Predictor Coding Round Plus BQGoogle · Data Scientist · HR Screen · Feb 2026
This round's interview question: given some training sentences, write two functions — a training function and a predictor function. The predictor function should take a word as input and output what the first word after that word could be. Example: ["I", "am", "Sam"] ["Sam", "I", "am"] ["I", "like", "green", "eggs", "and", "ham"] My approach: in the training function, use a dictionary to count ho…
- A Proctored OA Where 35 of 40 Questions Were About AIMeta · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Feb 2026In progress
VO on CodeSignal, camera on, screen shared. I had AI clean this up a bit — why has the polishing gotten so hard to use lately... it's not that it was hard, it's that the questions were long, with video explanations, so it took time just to understand them. New grad. HR reached out directly, and they want this filled very urgently — I need to get pushed to the final round within two weeks, and thi…
- A Seven-Round Superday With a Presentation Deck and No Lunch BreakMathWorks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Feb 2026Offer
This year a lot of companies are on a hiring freeze. MathWorks is one of the few still hiring — I landed an offer for the SWE2 role. I got in through a referral. Recruiter call: matched with a team in Simulink product cloud infra. Just a simple introduction and some logistics questions. OA: debugging plus a coding problem. Breezed through it. Phone screen 1: self-intro plus the classic CS trivia…
- A Statistics-Heavy Hiring Manager ScreenUpstart · Data Scientist · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Feb 2026In progress
In Q4 2024, a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn about a staff DS role at their company. After a short conversation, we scheduled a one-hour phone screen with the hiring manager (an ML Applications Director). After a brief self-introduction, we moved into the first part. He asked me to walk him through a project where I needed to measure impact but couldn't launch an experiment. I described…
- A Stream-Transformer Coding Question from the Phone ScreenJane Street · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
This is an old one — sharing a question from my campus recruiting interview back in the day. Given a set of M codes and N timestamps, the ideal shape for the data is an N x M matrix, where the rows are sorted by time and the columns are sorted by the code's lexicographic order. But not every code has data at every timestamp. You're given a stream of std::vector >,…
- A Tetris-Style Grid Placement OA QuestionCapital One · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Online Assessment · Feb 2026
There's an n x m grid of squares, and I need to draw a pattern on it. The pattern is made up of several fixed block shapes, kind of like Tetris. The problem gave 5 figure types: A, B, C, D, E. For A: in a 2x2 square, it only occupies the top-left, top-right, and bottom-left cells. So A is: That is, a U-shape / concave shape with the top-middle cell empty. This should go by the example matrix — fo…
- A Thread-Safe Video Player and a Symmetric-Points LeetCodeNuro · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
Only 1 round, which consisted of 2 interviews. The first was a coding system design question, and the second was a traditional LeetCode problem. Here is the first question: You're given a Frame class and a VideoPlayer class with the following operations: Read(): reads and returns the next frame of the video, or indicates that the end of the video has been reached. Render(frame): renders a frame o…
- A TinyURL Question With No HintsBytedance · Site Reliability Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
We spent the first half hour going through my resume — work experience and projects. It was the kind of technical background conversation that doesn't have a standard answer: why I got promoted at my current company, what key projects I worked on, how I determined that the database system I was responsible for was stable, what tools I'd written before, that kind of thing. For the last 25 minutes…
- A Two-Part CSV Transaction Fee Coding ProblemStripe · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
The screening interview started with the interviewer giving a very brief self-introduction, and then we went straight into the coding section. Part 1 was: given a CSV string of transactions, parse out each person's fee. Questions I asked the interviewer: What are the specific fee calculation rules for different transaction types and payment providers? For example, do payment transactions with car…
- Account Executive interview at Docusign: Post-interview feedbackDocusign · Account Executive · HR Screen · Feb 2026
I had a short, professional interview experience for an Account Executive-related role. It felt easy and respectful, with clear communication and feedback after the interview. I first spoke with HR in a professional online conversation. Then I had a role discussion with an interviewer who was welcoming and set a good tone for the process. Afterward, even though I didn't get the offer, I received…
- Aced the Coding Round, Rejected the Next DayLinkedIn · Data Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Rejected
Unfortunately I got laid off by my old company a few weeks ago. Through a good friend's referral, I got an interview for a LinkedIn Staff Data Engineer - Information Security role. The interviewer was really friendly — the whole thing was very warm and supportive. The interview was an hour total. We started with some small talk, then he asked two questions: Tell me about a project you worked on,…
- An AI-Chat Spreadsheet Design Question and a Brutal 45-Minute Merge ProblemGrammarly · Software Engineer · Onsite · Feb 2026Rejected
Overall people were pretty nice, and the recruiter was attentive — maybe the company just isn't that big yet and is still hiring. The bar for the questions didn't feel well calibrated, honestly a bit exaggerated. At this level, I think only people from the top, currently-hot AI star companies could really handle it. Why bother stressing over this one? Here are the two rounds of technical intervie…
