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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
- Three-Question OA Ending in a Shortest-Prefix Permutation ProblemVisa · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Visa's latest OA questions. Three questions in total: the first two were fundamental questions, and the third was an intermediate question. Question 1 I don't remember the problem statement clearly. It was fairly basic; I remember you needed a hashmap optimization to avoid TLE. Question 2 Given an integer array (a vector). For each integer in the array, find the minimum k such that: It is a posit…
- Three-Question OA With a Surprise 2-Minute AI Follow-upElevenlabs · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Fresh out of the oven. 3 questions, increasing in difficulty I guess, with time limits of 25 minutes, 30 minutes and 45 minutes respectively. Question 1: Next Number The next_number function should return the smallest integer which is superior to n and whose digits are all different from all of n's digits. For example, next_number(654321) return 700000. If no such integer exists, then the functio…
- Three-Round Onsite With Longest Increasing Path, a Greedy Problem, and an Inventory Service DesignVisa · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Round 1: the original LeetCode problem, longest-increasing-path-in-a-matrix. Debugging wasn't very convenient. I also had to write my own test cases and my own main, so that held me up for a long time and I didn't have enough time. At the end I brought up the optimal solution, using memoization to record results, but I was out of time. > Given an m x n integers matrix, return the length of the lo…
- TikTok E-commerce First Round: Tic-Tac-Toe Game-Over Check Pushed Down to O(1)ByteDance · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
Team: e-commerce Interview language: Chinese Round: first round It went straight into coding. I had GPT reconstruct the coding question, so just bear with it: The problem is a modified version of LeetCode 348 Design Tic-Tac-Toe. The difference is that it doesn't ask you to design a TicTacToe class and move(). Instead you're given the current n x n board directly and you implement GameOver(board)…
- Trade Data and Timestamp PrecisionCitadel Securities · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The author reports a Citadel Securities process with an initial recruiter screen and two technical interviews, without an online assessment. A New York team lead conducted a one-hour session involving trade reconciliation, behavioral questions, and design follow-ups. A London lead then held a longer-than-scheduled interview combining another trade-data task with detailed resume discussion. The ac…
- Traffic Analysis and Rate LimitingRender · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
A Render phone-screen report describes an incident-response exercise framed around an API denial-of-service scenario. The candidate receives three log files and must identify the five source IP addresses responsible for the most requests across the collection. A follow-up asks how to limit request rates. The supplied examples mix HTTP request records with background-job and other service messages…
- Transformer Bug Hunt with KV Cache from Scratch and a Five-Part Plant Infection ProblemOpenAI · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Hi, I am preparing for OpenAI's ML coding interview and have summarized the ML coding questions mentioned in the OpenAI/Anthropic interview rounds I have given so far. Anthropic Research Fundamentals Round: It was related to implementing an ML algo and discussing various research/mathematical aspects around it. OpenAI ML Coding (Transformer Debugging): Debugging 4-5 implanted bugs in the transfor…
- Tree Deletions and Four-in-a-Row DetectionSnowflake · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The author reports two Snowflake coding interviews, each lasting about an hour in an executable editor without AI assistance. The sessions included introductions or project discussion, technical work, and time for questions. The first round examined a multi-child tree where deleting a node promotes its children rather than removing its entire subtree. The initial task asked for the resulting heig…
- Two Coding Rounds and Four ProblemsSnowflake · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
IC1 phone screen, with two coding rounds. The interviewers were all very nice. I hope they will show mercy and let me pass. 🙏 Here is the timeline as well: 8/3: Referral 8/4: Scheduled the HR call 8/7: HR call, then the interview was scheduled that same day 9/3: Virtual onsite with two rounds First round: Question 1: Throne Inheritance. The only difference was that init did not provide the king.…
- Two Coding Rounds, a Manager BQ Chat, and a System Design RoundInstacart · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Two rounds of coding, and both were problems that had already been posted elsewhere before. The first one: the input is a transaction record and a set of discounts, and the discounts come in two types — one is a straight percentage off, the other is buy x get y free. The result you need to return is the best (lowest) price. There were 3 parts total, and I only got through the second part before t…
- Two GSAM Quant Roles, Live Coding Plus TSP, Then No HeadcountGoldman Sachs · Quantitative Researcher · Onsite · Sep 2026
I interviewed for two GSAM quant roles at the same time. Role one was more like a fund of funds kind of group. First round was live coding: power of ten and Newton's method square root. Second round was already the final round on-site: one medium problem that was not the usual kind, one expected value problem, and one round that was purely chatting about my experience. Role two was the equity SMA…
- Two OA Questions: Score Buckets and Reading Chapters by DayGoogle · Software Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Question 1: Given an array of integers (vector of ints), the index represents a student ID and the corresponding value is that student's score on the exam. The grading criteria are as follows: failed 80%: pass with distinction Return an array of 3 elements, representing the number of students who failed, the number with a regular pass, and the num…
- Two OA Questions: String Segmentation and Power-of-Two OperationsSalesforce · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Question 1: Minimum Segments with No Repeated Characters Given a string s, you need to perform the following operation exactly once, then compute the minimum number of non-overlapping, non-empty substrings with no repeated characters that the string can be split into: Choose any lowercase English letter, and delete every occurrence of it from the string. Constraints: 1
- Two Onsite Coding Rounds and Communication FrictionGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026In progress
r1 Given a connections array, where connections[x] is a list representing the neighboring nodes of x in a graph, and a broken value representing a damaged node, return the minimum number of nodes that must be traversed from start to destination without passing through broken. The solution could use DFS or BFS. I used DFS. The follow-up allowed traversal through broken nodes. r2 Implement a word p…
- Two Onsite Rounds and an Unexpected Catalog DesignAttentive · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
I was contacted and invited to an onsite. Round 1 combined coding and system design. Round 2 included coding, system design, and behavioral questions. I felt that my system design and behavioral performance in Round 2 was poor, and I was ultimately rejected. There were not many interview reports about this company, so I summarized everything I could find. All the questions I received turned out t…
- Two Phone Screens, DAG Coding and a Control Plane DesignSnowflake · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Two phone screens, one coding and one system design. The coding question was a "privilege" problem that is already on the forum (the DAG allow/disallow letters one). The difference in the requirements was that each node passes down its own final state to its children, instead of passing allow and disallow separately. I propagated in topological order, and at each step every node computes its late…
- Two SQL Questions and Similar Pins in PythonPinterest · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I'm sharing the questions I encountered in a Pinterest technical interview. I've organized them to give back, and I hope this helps anyone preparing! The descriptions below are reconstructed from memory. I've simplified the field names; these aren't word-for-word copies of the original questions. SQL: The top two categories by engagement rate in each country (I don't quite remember exactly how ma…
- Two Teams and a Lasso DerivationPoint72 · Quantitative Researcher · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
I applied for QR Intern and QR Alpha Intern positions based in Hong Kong. There was no online assessment. HR matched me with two teams. One Hong Kong team working on APAC equities. Three interviewers, one PM, one MLE, and one QR, for 30 minutes. They mainly asked about an internship on my resume involving quantitative work and algorithms, in very fine detail. I basically had to explain every step…
- Two-Hour Screen Ends on a Syntax ErrorPlaid · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
I saw online that the first round is usually one hour, but I applied for a backend role and they required two hours back to back, with a 15-30 minute break in the middle. The first hour's question was a common pipeline question from the forum, and it went smoothly. After I finished, the interviewer was very insistent about how to test it, including wanting asserts in Python rather than print stat…
- URL Maze BFS Tech Screen with Flaky 503s and a Silent InterviewerRamp · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
Just finished my Ramp tech screen today, so here's the writeup. Process: one hour, one question, 5 minutes of Q&A at the end. Question: URL Maze (a classic that keeps showing up in past interview reports) You're given a start URL. Calling it returns JSON where the key is next_stops and the value is a list of paths. You append each path to the host and keep visiting, until some URL returns {"messa…
- Verification Role, Offer After Eight WeeksNVIDIA · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Sep 2026Offer
The interview mostly revolved around FIFO, round-robin arbiter, valid/ready handshake, scoreboard/reference model, constraints, SVA and functional coverage. They give you a small design/spec and have you discuss it from the angle of verification architecture, corner cases, assertions and coverage. They also ask brain teasers, and there are a lot of them online. The coding/RTL part is mainly basic…
- Virtual Onsite Design Round: Sora With One GPU per TaskOpenAI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026In progress
Same as the coding round, the interviewer pulled out the question from my phone screen. But the interviewer was really friendly, and he also told me an important piece of information: right now the company has interviewers pick the power grid question as their first choice, so everyone should prepare that one more. Later it switched to designing Sora, and a pretty useful constraint was that each…
- Virtual Onsite Rescheduled a Dozen Times, GPU Credit Coding RoundOpenAI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
First, let me vent about how chaotic this company is. It was originally scheduled as 4 rounds in one day. Then it got rescheduled a dozen-plus times and ended up as 4 days with 1 round each. The interviewer also got swapped 7-8 times... On top of that, the interviewer didn't know what I'd been asked in the phone screen, so the question they gave me was the same one as my phone screen, and then th…
- VP Chat, Four Rounds, Then Team MatchingSalesforce · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026In progress
Cross Cloud org. Round 1 was a chat with a VP. Round 2 was an OA; one of the questions was problem 443. Round 3 was two VOs, one coding and one system design. The coding was problem 460. The system design was to design a coffee shop order system. Round 4 was the onsite, same as above. The coding question was the same as the one in another thread on this forum — maybe a bit more complex, because y…
- Wiki Crawler Design and a Talent Pool RejectionLyft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
The phone screen was the typical one: they give you an API that can fetch pages, and you write a wrapper that calls this external API to implement fetching by word count. Onsite, showtime. The system design was wiki crawling: how do you crawl all of the wiki's content and store it, while keeping it updated within a certain time window, for example no more than five days stale. The coding was the…
- Withdrew from the SDE II Virtual OnsiteAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Withdrew
Some details have been intentionally obscured. HR reached out on LinkedIn. I ignored the first message, but then they messaged once a week for the next two weeks. I wasn't doing much, so I thought I might as well interview and see. At the end of July, I took the OA for position one and received a phone-screen invitation the next day. One question involved a drone delivering packages clockwise aro…
- & General Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience: an uneven hiring-manager conversation& General Intuition · Software Engineer · Other · Aug 2026
The process felt unevenly organized from the start. Communication and the collaboration vibe varied depending on the round. The part that stayed with me was a hiring-manager-style conversation that became a judgment of my career choices, rather than staying focused on fit or leadership. That did not sit well with me. I do not remember every technical detail, but the overall experience was noticea…
- & General Intuition Software Engineer interview with AI coding round& General Intuition · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026
I started with an HR call, then about a week later had a 45-minute online coding interview. That felt like the core screen: solve the problem live and explain my thinking as I went. I was then invited to the Sunnyvale office for an onsite loop. The onsite was a fuller day with a group discussion, system design, an AI-coding-style interview, and a wrap-up discussion. It tested more than one narrow…
- 2027 Intern/New Grad OA Games and CodingRoblox · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
My Roblox OA from a month ago. Round 1: Cognitive Games, three mini-games Robots: Assemble tools to cross different terrain. Try different assemblies to reach the finish. Factory: Optimize the production-line network, identify bottleneck stations, and maximize cash flow on the high-profit lines. Mars: Outpost: Modular programming. Watch out: only functions packaged during the testing phase can be…
- 25 Minutes to Hand-Code a Concurrent Task ExecutorMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
I applied pretty randomly online, and HR reached out to schedule an interview for yesterday afternoon. I went in with a "just watching the show" mindset, and honestly the whole experience was terrible — basically a setup for failure. If I'd actually been seriously job hunting, this would have driven me insane. First, it was a one-hour technical phone screen, and half an hour of that went into goi…
