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.
- 3935
- Experiences
- 857
- Companies
- 532
- Offers
3935 results
- Four Rounds on the AEP Team, Recruiter Wanted More System Design ExperienceAdobe · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025
This was for the AEP team — a pit that a friend referred me into. Four rounds total, overall not too hard. Round 1 was billed as tech/coding, but after we finished going over my resume, the interviewer just started asking about request latency analysis, plus some front-end/back-end fundamentals-style questions. I initially expected coding or system design, but it ended up basically being a conver…
- GenAI Reorg Chaos Mid-LoopMeta · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025
The whole interview experience was pretty bizarre, moving at the same pace as Zuckerberg's MSL reorg. At the start, it was the GenAI department interviewing me, matched to one specific team. Then they just couldn't get an interview scheduled — it dragged on for over a month. By the time the interview finally got scheduled, GenAI had already been carved out to Alex Wang, so this was one of the mos…
- Go-Heavy Screen and a Notepad Coding RoundTripStack · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025Rejected
I applied online to a platform that searches and sells connecting/interline flight tickets. After I applied, a recruiter reached out and said I'd need to do an OA first. Since the company uses Go, there was no other language option. The OA had two questions, one greedy and one DP, and the difficulty was unusually high for an OA. After I passed the OA, it took the recruiter two weeks to tell me I'…
- Great First Two Rounds, Then a Hostile HM Round and a GhostingTikTok · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025No response
Quick summary: Round 1: LeetCode 300 + resume questions. Round 2: LeetCode 403 + resume questions. Round 3: resume only. TL;DR: all high-frequency questions, grind them, and talk through your resume well. If you don't want to read the rant, feel free to skip out now — what follows is my personal venting, and I need to get it off my chest. The first two rounds felt like they were with people actua…
- HackerRank OA: News Subscription System DesignOptiver · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2025
✅ Interview experience summary: News Subscription System design (hands-on HackerRank question) 📌 Problem background (system design) You're a news aggregation service. The goal is to give users one unified system for subscribing to all news providers, so they only receive content they're interested in without being overloaded with volume. The system needs to manage large data streams efficiently a…
- HR Screen Cut Short Before the Hour Was UpShopify · Machine Learning Engineer · HR Screen · Sep 2025
In summary, if you read through the interview experience posts here, you'll basically have most of the questions covered. The main thing is to sound natural in the moment — it feels like you need to get along well with the HR person during the chat. At the start, the HR person made small talk, chatting about the weekend. First question: why are you interested in Shopify. I tried to follow a templ…
- Impatient Interviewer, Essay-Length QuestionScale AI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025Rejected
I'd looked at this company before and thought about applying, but I never really believed I'd pass an interview here, so I went in with a "just try it" mindset. The whole interview was really contradictory. You'd think a technical interview would be short and to the point, but the interviewer was very impatient the whole way through. He gave only a very brief, shallow rundown of himself and what…
- In-Memory Banking OA, Then a Surprise LLM Classifier ScreenAnthropic · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
After mass-applying online, HR reached out really fast — they basically sent the OA in the second week. The OA was pretty simple: design an in-memory banking system, four levels total. There's discussion of this question all over the forum. The first level was designing three functions: add account, pay, and deposit. The logic was simple — just define a dict to track accounts and balances. The se…
- In-Memory Cloud Storage Coding QuestionCloudKitchens · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2025
This was a bit different from the other report on this same file storage question. The first two parts were about the same: create a file, create a user. The third part was about adjusting capacity — when you reduce a user's capacity, you need to consider deleting the largest-size files. The fourth part was about compressing and decompressing a file. One thing to watch out for: Level 2's requirem…
- Live-Coded LeetCode 934, Debugged a Stack Overflow MyselfCoupang · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
Problem LeetCode 934, Shortest Bridge When I answered, I first laid out all his examples in a structured way below, then started with the function just returning 0. Running it gave n zeros, and I told him this was the first iteration. The next step was to finish the function so it returns the correct result. While working through it, I ran into a case where the recursion wasn't controlled properl…
- Log Binary Search With Two Graph Follow-upsSnowflake · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
A classic problem in applied-problem form. Binary Search The input is a log history. There are three types of logs: Info, Warn, and Error, and each log line starts with its own type — for example an Info log looks like "[Info] ...". The log history follows two patterns: Once an Error shows up, the service goes down, and every log after that is Error The log right before the first Error is always…
- Loop Went Well, Then Rejected Over a Seniority MismatchDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025Rejected
LinkedIn HR reached out and said my background was a good fit; after an HR call, I moved into the interview process. The Phone Screen was an Easy coding question plus a follow-up — string matching. After passing the Phone Screen, I had a 30-minute informal chat with the Hiring Manager, mostly about the team's work and my own experience. After that, HR reached out to schedule the Loop Interview. T…
- Maximizing Reward as Pixels Reveal One Row at a TimeJane Street · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
The interview was about solving an actual problem. The setup was an image classification problem using the FashionMNIST dataset. The model (a plain CNN) and the training code were already written, and the task was to modify it question by question from there; the environment they gave me was a Jupyter notebook (.ipynb). There were mainly two parts. After understanding the code (there wasn't much…
- Meeting Scheduler Follow-ups, Paxos/Raft BQ, and a Driver HeatMap System DesignUber · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025Offer
Technical Screen: The interviewer tested an algorithm problem (the name was written in an obscured/garbled way in the original post), with a follow-up asking for a simple multithreading variation. Virtual Onsite: Algorithm round: one of the interviewers tested something pretty similar to the earlier problem, with a follow-up about not passing time in as an argument. BQ round, with the hiring mana…
- Missing the One Case the Forum's Writeup Left OutRippling · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025In progress
It's the courier question that's already up on the forum, and the forum write-up was already very detailed! But there's one thing it left out: the same dasher can take multiple orders at the same time. When I was practicing beforehand I hadn't considered that case, and I hadn't seen it mentioned on the forum either, so when the third, concurrent follow-up came out, I had to think about it for a b…
- MLSD on Driver ETAs, Then a Coding Problem I'd Never Seen BeforeUber · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025
The first round was MLSD, but it wasn't a traditional recommendation system or search problem — it was a design for real-time updates to the remaining ETA of every driver within a grid. You could only use the data they gave you, so the questions got very detailed, and any manual feature was challenged down to the last detail — I had to spell out exactly how every step would be implemented. GPS si…
- No Extra Memory AllowedTesla · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
I'm finally getting around to keeping a promise — sharing my phone screen experience for Tesla Dojo. The coding difficulty was medium-to-hard, but the bar for detail was very high. Hope this is useful for anyone else interviewing for Dojo. The interviewer showed up a little late, and jumped straight into coding with barely any small talk. Tesla's efficiency is really something. You're given a lis…
- OA Puzzles Then a One-Hour Life Story InterviewShopify · Machine Learning Engineer · HR Screen · Sep 2025In progress
After submitting my resume on the official website, I quickly got a reply from HR. They scheduled a life story interview, but before that I needed to do an OA. The OA has two parts. The first part is about 20-25 minutes, with 40 questions total — spot-the-difference across images, number sequences where you find the pattern, addition and multiplication calculations, that kind of thing. You're all…
- OA Questions Matched a 1point3acres CompilationCitadel · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2025
I was tested on the last two of these. My solutions passed all the test cases. All of the questions below are from 1point3acres. Prefix Count of "10" Given a binary string sequence of length n, you can perform the following operation any number of times: append a '0' or '1' to the end of the sequence. After updating the sequence (i.e. appending characters to the end of the original sequence), if…
- OA Then a Phone Screen With Palindrome and Dice-Game Brain TeasersJane Street · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
I submitted my resume and got the OA email the next day. The problem was one that's already floating around the forum: using Excel to calculate a haircut, plus general Excel formula usage. Same numbers as the version posted on the forum, nothing changed. My suggestion if you're filling in the spreadsheet and need to use data from the problem's own table: use a reference, not copy-paste. The probl…
- OA With No IDE, Then a BQ-Only HM RoundEvenUp · Staff Data Scientist · Senior+ · Other · Sep 2025Rejected
The first stage was an OA that took about an hour. It had two parts. The first part was maybe a dozen or so multiple choice questions, covering a lot of ground quickly — there were data processing questions, questions about statistical distributions, and some basic hypothesis testing concepts. There was plenty of time, I think it was 25 minutes for under 15 questions? The second part was rough —…
- One Round, Four Parts: Resume, ML Trivia, and Live NumPy CodingNVIDIA · Technical Marketing Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
Technical Marketing Engineer - NVIDIA AI. NVIDIA has five rounds total, two with coding and three without coding. My interviewer was a data scientist. She asked me how many coding rounds I'd already had, and I said only one, so she said okay, then this round has to include coding, we can't just do a pure Q&A chat. Here's the whole flow, four parts: resume, technical fundamentals, coding, and ques…
- One-Hour Technical Screen Covering K8s, SLOs, and LeetCode 94TikTok · SRE · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
Interview process Overall it was a technical interview lasting about 1 hour The interviewer was pretty friendly, but the questions covered a wide range — felt like they were testing general SRE skills plus coding fundamentals Interview content Kubernetes Asked some basic K8s principles, like the difference between Pod and Deployment, and what a Service does. Also asked how to debug a Pod that fai…
- Onsite Loop: Product Sense, Data Modeling, Python, SQLMeta · Data Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025
Product Sense (10 minutes) Try to keep your answers fairly brief. Prepare 4-6 main metrics and you don't need to explain in much detail why you picked each one, unless you feel the interviewer wants to hear more or they ask directly. Every interviewer's expectations are a little different, but overall I felt they don't dig in that deep, so don't spend too much time preparing for this part. The qu…
- Panicked on a String Palindrome and Failed the ScreenSamsung · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025Rejected
I'm new to industry and to LeetCode, not a CS major, and I recently gave up on academia to try to switch into industry. I got lucky and landed a first-round interview with Samsung, one hour, with a senior staff interviewer. The whole thing was scheduled in a rush — the confirmation email with the interview link only went out the day before, and it wasn't until I saw the coding link that I realize…
- Passed Every Unit Test, Still RejectedBilt Rewards · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025Rejected
A recruiter from this company reached out to me directly on LinkedIn — not a staffing agency. After the recruiter call, we scheduled a phone screen. Side rant: I actually have this credit card myself, and the Android app is painfully slow. They basically survive by hoodwinking Wells Fargo and their investors. Anyway, after replying on LinkedIn we set up an intro call, and this recruiter also emai…
- Passed Five Rounds but Lost to an Internal Hire, Plus Coupang, Databricks, and Mistral AI Along the WayApple · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2025Rejected
Background: 5.5 years of experience, all of it at second-tier companies doing infra. Goal: mainly looking to move into AI-related work. Target level is Google L5 equivalent or above. I'm not afraid of a heavy workload, I like healthy competition. Timeline: started grinding problems and sending out resumes from early February, and by early June had gradually started getting offers and wrapped up i…
- Passed Round 1 Coding I Couldn't Solve, Rejected After Round 2TikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025Rejected
The first round was with a peer based in North America. They opened with some common project questions — what was the hardest part, and how I solved it. Then there was a coding question, a variant of a LeetCode problem. They gave a string and a width. The first part was to split the whole string into lines of that width, then add a suffix to each line saying which line number it is out of the tot…
- Passed the 45-Minute Live Coding Phone ScreenStripe · Frontend Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025In progress
I want to share my recent phone screen experience with Stripe's frontend team. The role was a remote Frontend Engineer position, and I got into the process through a friend's referral. Things moved pretty fast — when scheduling the interview, the recruiter sent over the coding guide and prep focus areas right away. The phone screen was 45 minutes of live coding. The interviewer was a senior front…
- Personality-Test OA, Then a Culture-Heavy HR ScreenShopify · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Sep 2025In progress
I found someone on LinkedIn to refer me to Shopify. Given how the job market is right now, if you can get a referral, just take it. The day after the referral I got an email for an HR interview. The OA was a personality test plus some basic math questions and spot-the-difference puzzles, using the Criteria CCAT question bank. 40 questions in 40 minutes. Not hard, felt more like an IQ test than co…
