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
- Plaid Customer Success Engineer interview with Quickstart homework and technical questionsPlaid · Customer Success Engineer · Take-home Project · Jan 2026
I went through two stages. The first consisted of take-home exercises. I had to run Plaid’s Quickstart setup and write response emails to mock customers dealing with specific problems. I liked this part because it made me research what was happening and think through how to communicate in a calm, supportive way. The second stage was a one-on-one call. I was told it would be a short conversation w…
- Plaid Software Engineer interview focused on algorithmic designPlaid · Software Engineer · Jan 2026
My interviews focused mostly on general problem solving, with algorithmic design questions instead of classic LeetCode-style problems. The bar itself wasn't clearly communicated, and the process didn't feel very professional. I also dealt with untimely responses and a sense that nothing was being evaluated consistently as the interviews progressed. By the time the process ended, it felt more like…
- Plaid Software Engineer interview: three rounds with a three-hour finalPlaid · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Jan 2026
I moved through a tight three-round sequence: an OA, an HR chat, and a final round. The timeline felt fast, and the recruiter was professional. The OA was split into two parts under one larger question, with difficulty around the medium LeetCode level. The final round lasted three hours, divided into 1.5 hours of technical work and 1.5 hours of conversation with a manager. The technical portion i…
- Prepping in 60 Days After a LayoffMeta · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Jan 2026Offer
My Meta process began under a lot of pressure. Microsoft laid me off, and I gave myself 60 days to get a new job lined up. Because of that deadline I kept my prep tight and disciplined. I didn't wander around and I didn't grind blindly. I just picked things and executed. What my prep looked like Data structures and algorithms Over the years I had done about 450 LeetCode problems. For Meta I went…
- Product Sense, SQL, and a Pandas Group-By SlipLinkedIn · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
Interviewers: the main interviewer and a shadow interviewer, both very friendly. Question 1: Product Sense — how would you analyze a drop in traffic from the Home Page to the Profile Page? (20 mins) My approach: Start with a qualitative check: open LinkedIn's homepage myself to see if there's an obvious change or bug. For example, there was a recent user report that searching for someone's name s…
- Referral, Fast Loop, and a Painfully Slow Immigration Law FirmDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026Offer
Backfilling my full February DoorDash interview. It was a friend's referral. The process moved really fast, probably because my previous team and this team were a very close match in terms of business. The guidance said the coding round would be "coding with AI", but in the actual interview there was no AI assistance and no AI round, and the interviewers said they had never heard that AI was allo…
- Rejected the Morning After a Rover Pair-Programming RoundShopify · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Rejected
After a quick first call with the recruiter, they immediately scheduled a pair programming round plus an assessment. The assessment was done online first, and included 40 IQ questions plus 120 behavioral questions. All 40 questions were pretty simple. The recruiter's email said to find a quiet place and have paper and pen ready, but it turned out to just be simple stuff like spot-the-difference p…
- Robotics Charging Logic and Package DimensionsAmazon · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
I read a lot of interview reports here while preparing, so now I'm giving something back, especially since there seem to be so few Amazon Robotics posts. I interviewed in March this year for a summer 2026 internship. Two rounds, one hour each, both behavioral questions + LeetCode. Make sure to prepare the Leadership Principles well. Behavioral questions took half an hour in the manager round. Be…
- Round 2 Was BQ Plus a DP Video-Scheduling ProblemTikTok · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Jan 2026In progress
Round 1 went pretty smoothly, and they told me about round 2 the next day — this round also wrapped up well. After a self-introduction, the interviewer moved into behavioral questions, mostly digging into my resume: briefly describe your internship project, what you learned from it, what was the most challenging project, how communication worked within the project team, what role you played, and…
- Scale Software Engineer interview with practical frontend workScale · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
My interview path followed a fairly classic structure: a recruiter screen, a technical screen, and then meetings that expanded into onsite-style rounds. The technical portion included system design and practical problem-solving that combined algorithmic work with a frontend component, so it was more ambiguous than pure coding. The hardest part for me was figuring out what the interviewers expecte…
- Sharding Embeddings and Language-Model OutputsMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026
The author describes a Microsoft AI infrastructure virtual-onsite discussion centered on distributing large embedding tables and language-model output layers across GPUs. The interview compared splitting by vocabulary entries with splitting by hidden dimensions, asking how each choice affects memory use, communication, and connections to later computation. Follow-ups examined routing token lookup…
- Sloppy Scheduling, No Lunch, and a Surprisingly Easy OnsitePalo Alto Networks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026
First, let me vent about the interview experience here — it was very unprofessional. From start to finish I never received a single HR email; it was always unscheduled phone calls, and I never got any prep doc either. Contact was basically one-way. After the HR call in January, almost a month went by with no movement, and I figured it was dead. Then suddenly they reached out to schedule the hirin…
- Smartsheet Software Engineer interview with four rounds and no follow-upSmartsheet · Software Engineer · Other · Jan 2026No response
The process started with some hope and turned into a long stretch of frustration. I completed four interview rounds and was even told that an offer would be released. After that, everything stalled. They said they were waiting for other roles to be onboarded together, and the process kept dragging on. Eventually, they stopped responding altogether. I received no updates or feedback, and they didn…
- Solved the Dependency Graph Problem, Still Rejected for Not Flagging Edge CasesUber · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Rejected
I finished the problem and ran a few test cases I wrote myself. A week later I got a "moving forward with other candidates" rejection. I had AI polish up the problem statement a bit: Package Build Order (dependency build order) Problem description (abstract version): The interviewer gave me an interface: — it returns the direct dependencies of a given package. Requirements: given a target package…
- SQL and Product Questions Built Around Ads PixelMeta · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jan 2026In progress
I interviewed at Meta last Friday, and Monday evening I got an email from the recruiter saying I passed — coming back to report on this. Both the SQL and the product question were built around ads pixel, which I'd almost never seen in previous interview writeups before. There were two SQL questions total, both pretty simple. The first was a simple aggregation. The second asked about the relations…
- SQL-Only Screen, Five Tables, and a Passive InterviewerShopify · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jan 2026In progress
I just finished the interview and I want to write this up while it's still fresh. Before the interview they told me it would be SQL and Python, but in the end it was SQL only. It opened with a self-introduction and a few simple questions about the project I've been working on recently. The setup was the pirated-theme question that's already known on this forum, though the specific version I got m…
- Stackadapt Account Executive interview: three rounds with clear feedbackStackadapt · Account Executive · Other · Jan 2026
The interview process felt unusually smooth and respectful to me. The recruiter communicated throughout, and the company’s values came through in how people treated me. I wasn’t ghosted, and the process was clear. I went through three rounds and spoke with five different people. Those conversations helped me learn about the role and how the team worked. Each one felt honest and grounded rather th…
- Straight to Onsite After the OA, Offer Through Pattern PracticeMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026Offer
I just finished the Microsoft interview loop and ended up with an offer, so I'm writing down what worked best for me. I'm a software engineer, mostly backend work and distributed services, though never at a big tech company. The process looked a lot like what other companies do, with one difference: there was no recruiter screen. After the online assessment I was sent straight to the onsite. That…
- Take-home Event System Design, Code Review and a Redis-style CacheCrowdstrike · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Jan 2026Offer
I wanted a job with a more flexible schedule so I could be home more with my family and my young daughter. I prepped for just one month, using an online system design course, and came out with an offer from CrowdStrike. On paper it was a sideways move, Sr. SDE where I am now to Sr. SDE there, but the offer came in about 15% above my current pay. Most of my prep time went into the system design co…
- Team Matching Before Two One-Hour InterviewsAmazon · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Offer
Behavioral (after OA): This year, there were two interviews, each 1 hour long. They team matched before the interview, so I ended up getting an offer under the team that interviewed me. Interviewers were the manager of that team and an L5 SWE (SWE II, one above entry level), both consisted of a technical leetcode-style question, then behavioral. Manager spent more time on behavioral, SWE spent mo…
- Third Loop After Two Failures, One Messy Coding RoundMeta · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Jan 2026
Backstory Two earlier Meta attempts had ended in failure, so going into round three I was sure I had to change my whole approach and be much more systematic. Looking back, those misses pointed at the same gaps: my prep was shallow and I hadn't kept it steady. Preparation This time I committed roughly three months to getting ready properly. The plan came down to two things: LeetCode mediums and ha…
- Three Multiple-Choice Questions and Two Coding ProblemsC3 AI · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Jan 2026
Three multiple-choice questions and two coding questions on HackerRank, with no camera required. Multiple-choice questions Time Complexity Hash There are 7 computers in a network (numbered from 0 to 6). Each network request is assigned to one of those computers. Hash function used for that is: H(id) = id % 7 Which computer will have maximum load if the request ids are... A retrieval augmented gen…
- Three Onsite Rounds on Multimodal Deployment and DropoutBytedance · Data Scientist · Onsite · Jan 2026
Round 1 Discussed how to deploy a multimodal model when compute and GPU memory are limited. Follow-up: given existing captions and embeddings, how to speed up video retrieval. Asked what overfitting is and how to mitigate it. Coding question: implement a MinStack that returns the minimum in O(1) time. Round 2 Discussed methods to mitigate overfitting in deep learning and how Dropout works. Compar…
- Trexquant Investment Quantitative Analyst medium coding roundTrexquant Investment · Quantitative Analyst · HR Screen · Jan 2026
I started with an HR call and then moved straight into a first technical round with a senior researcher. We discussed my resume, including follow-up questions, and then I was given a LeetCode medium problem. Depending on what came up from my experience, there was also room for probability or statistics questions. The coding portion felt like a direct test of fundamentals: arrays, clean implementa…
- 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…
- Two Research-Focused Rounds, Then an OfferByteDance · Intern · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Offer
First time sharing. Calling it an "interview report" is generous — it's more just my interview experience. Background: USNews Top 20 AI PhD, 3rd year, working on agent optimization and agentic RL. My publication record is pretty average, nothing that stands out — 2 ACL + 2 KDD + 1 EACL. I interned at Amazon before this. 03.17 Volcano Ark, AML Enterprise - RS team, HR call. Confirmed I could start…
- Two Rounds, Then Doubts About an All-Research RoleOracle · Data Scientist · Intern · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
Two rounds total, and the interviewers barely showed any expression the whole time. Two rounds total: the first was with someone pretty senior who asked me about a past project of mine, question-and-answer format, behavioral. The second round was coding plus introducing another one of my projects. They mainly work on conversational AI, and the questions didn't dig into specific technical details…
- Two System Design Rounds and a Project Deep DiveSnapchat · Engineering Manager · Senior+ · Onsite · Jan 2026Offer
Background I got laid off from my last job, a small-scale public company that pays at the top of the market, in the Coinbase / Dropbox / Airbnb tier. It was mostly because of a re-org, even though I had been rated Exceeds three years running. Still, after working through a system design course and building up a pile of leadership stories (you want enough of them to cover something like 40-50 diff…
- Two-Hour Bank Service Build, Then an HM RoundValon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026
Valon's onsite format is pretty unusual: you get 2 hours to implement one problem. The goal is to build a banking service made up of 5 parts. My feeling is that you need to get through at least parts 3-4, but you are not required to finish everything. How the time is split: First 30 minutes: go through the problem with an engineer, discuss the design, and start building. Middle 90 minutes: you wr…
- 25 Min SQL, 25 Min Python, and I Only Passed One of EachMeta · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Dec 2025
I've been pretty happy at my current company and honestly wasn't planning to switch jobs. A recruiter from Meta reached out to me a few times, though, so I went into the interview with a just-try-it-and-see attitude. Technical round (25 min SQL + 25 min Python) I hadn't touched LeetCode in a long time. The questions weren't super hard, but they were tricky. The interviewer spoke excellent English…
