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
- Four-Part Split Tender Online AssessmentStripe · Software Engineer · New Grad · Online Assessment · Oct 2026
I converted the screenshot version into text, including some test cases, to help everyone prepare! Split Tender Many of Stripe's merchants rely on Stripe Terminal to accept in-person payments at the point of sale. In physical retail, it's common for a customer to cover a purchase with multiple payment methods. For example, they might cover a $100 purchase with a $40 gift card combined with a $60…
- Full OCI Loop, Rejected After a Short HM RoundOracle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026Rejected
Phone screen: a sliding window problem, find the shortest sub-array whose sum is greater than or equal to a given target, except that duplicate numbers are only counted once (e.g. sum([3,3,2]) = 5). There was also one regular BQ question. VO: Round 1: LC 200 plus a BQ. The follow-up asked me to write it with BFS, and they also asked about Making A Large Island, where I walked through my approach.…
- Fumbled the Live Coding, Rejected the Next DayLegora · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
Sharing my interview experience at Legora for Senior Software Engineer in Stockholm, Sweden. First was a recruiter call to chat about my past experience, background and interest in the company. Second was a technical screen (45 mins) with one of the engineers on the team. Out of the 45 mins, 20 mins were for a project deep dive. They asked questions about tradeoffs, scale, challenges faced and wh…
- Game of Life Scaled to 1M x 1M in a Phone ScreenApplied Intuition · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
The interviewer first demoed Conway's Game of Life in the browser (I had never heard of it before), then pasted starter code into CoderPad: next_gen computes the next generation of the board. There is a helper _process_cell(old_board, new_board, row, col) that decides whether a cell lives or dies based on its neighbor count. The initial board is random with a probability p between 0 and 1, so the…
- Go Trivia Output Prediction and Roller Coaster Coding on Onsite Day OneZoox · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026In progress
My onsite is split over two days, and the first day was only trivia + coding. I had been practicing in Python, but when I heard there would be a trivia round, I asked to switch to Go, since I use Go more in my day-to-day work and Go has fewer things they can ask trivia about. The interviewer did not ask any conceptual questions. He just gave me code and had me predict the output. Question 1: Ques…
- GPU Hash Partition Phone Screen in C++, Two Weeks to the Next RoundNVIDIA · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2026In progress
I asked a friend to refer me to a lot of NVIDIA positions. This was the first one to respond, and I really felt how slow the process is. After the phone screen it took two weeks just to schedule the next interview. The interviewer was a bit of a nerd. The topic was GPU partitioning, in C++. Given an array and P partitions, do a hash partition, and the output has to return the offsets. It is the c…
- Hiring Manager Chat, Then Three VO RoundsUnity · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026
The first round was a hiring manager round. We just chatted about my resume and background. After that came 3 rounds of VO: System design round: Design a feature store that supports both offline ML training workflows and online low-latency serving. It must handle high-volume event data, give point-in-time correct retrieval for training, and serve features at low latency in production. Project dee…
- In-Person Onsite with a Design Round and a Train Schedule QuestionGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026
The onsite was in-person (but virtual was an option) and only two rounds. I only had 4 interviews total with Google. Onsite was solutions design and Leetcode question. Solutions design question was design a review ingestion platform for an e-commerce site that takes reviews and summarizes them with an LLM for an internal dashboard. Focus on trust and safety, prompt injection, data sanitization, P…
- Java-Only CoderPad Screen With a Progressive Store-Hours ProblemApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
I'm definitely done for after today's interview, no need to even think about it. I'm sharing my experience, and I'd also like everyone to help me critique it. The interviewer didn't introduce himself and there was no BQ. He just told me to open CoderPad and start writing a problem. The problem was progressive, and I could only use Java. It wasn't hard at all. There's a store, you're given an open…
- Kafka Idempotency Grilling and a Silent HRAlibaba · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026No response
HR chatted with me first and explained the process: roughly three technical rounds, and at the end an HRBP round for behavioral questions. The first video round was coding. A few pleasantries, then 10 minutes of the standard memorized-theory questions, then coding: 146 and 460. They didn't make me run it. I passed, and they scheduled the other two video rounds, one with the technical lead and one…
- L6 Phone Screen With an Impatient Interviewer, LCA Follow-up StuckAmazon · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
The interviewer was impossible to find anywhere online, I couldn't find a thing about him and I'm speechless. BQ: 1. How do you evaluate customer experience? 2. A major unexpected obstacle. For the first one, I think the point of the question was the evaluation part, and my story was just directly collecting feedback, which he wasn't happy with 😭 For the second one, he felt the obstacle wasn't ma…
- Market Data API Design Round, Expecting a RejectionRobinhood · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026In progress
Design the Robinhood Marketdata API GET /quotes/{symbol}/live: real-time quote, ~10M qps GET /quotes/{symbol}/historical?range=(1d,1m,1y): historical range, ~1M qps They gave me a data source, NASDAQ Last Sale: two independent, redundant long-lived TCP connections (Conn A/B); about 7,000 symbols; peak of ~100k trades/s on each connection; 6.5 trading hours per day. Message format: symbol (4-5 ASC…
- Mempool Block Packing and CPFP Phone ScreenCoinbase · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026In progress
It was the problem about picking transactions from a mempool to pack into a block. I hadn't really touched this area before, so I was a bit lost when I first read the problem. Part one gives an unsorted array of transactions, each with an id, fee, and size. The block capacity is fixed at 100. You pick some transactions to put in, the total size can't go over, and you want to collect as much fee a…
- No-Coding Technical Screen with Code-Reading Questions, Did Not PassMercor · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
I applied online. There is no recruiter screen - first call is a HM screen where they ask you basic questions. Next screen is a 30 minute technical screen with no coding. Mine had 4 questions - Tell me the worst sorting algorithm - (n!) and explain how you would calculate each permutation You visit two coffeeshops A and B and order 2 drinks from each. Each drink gets a quality score. What is the…
- One-Hour Concurrency Round on Batching HTTP Requests, RejectedAnrok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
1-hour interview, focused on concurrency. The interviewer has a bachelor's in CS from MIT. The role is SWE, AI Infra, and it requires a bachelor's plus 3 years of YOE. The problem: send an HTTP batch request to /get?keys=key1,key2 every 100ms. You need to think about how to schedule the 100ms callback, and how to store the keys waiting to be sent along with the callback for each key. Make sure ht…
- Passed the Tech Screen, Rejected After the VO (AI Coding, Integration, BugSquash)Stripe · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Oct 2026Rejected
Writing down my 2027 NG Stripe rejection (and, as a bonus, what I think is the most complete set of Stripe NG prep material you can find online). Timeline 2026.9.3 the role opened, I got a friend to refer me → 2026.9.4 got the OA → 2026.9.6 finished the OA, all test cases passed in half an hour → 2026.9.10 got an email from HR to schedule the Technical Screening → booked 9.16 for the Technical Sc…
- Phone Screen Failed on a Fault Tolerant Queue and a Typing Race DesignOpenAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
I had two phone screen rounds, one coding and one design. The coding round was a fault tolerant queue. I had to implement enqueue, reserve, fail, and a DLQ, and there were 7 unit tests that all had to pass. Part 2 added task dependencies. Each task comes with a cooldown after it gets preempted, and you have to use the preempt timestamp to work out yourself when the cooldown ends. Also, when a tas…
- Phone Screen on a Key-Value Store with TTL, RejectedNetflix · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
I recently interviewed for an IC5 role on the Netflix Ads team. The phone screen was the classic Key-Value Store with TTL. Personally I felt it went okay. I implemented the usual set of methods, and for TTL expiration I used a min heap keyed on timestamp. I explained my design thinking and the tradeoffs as I went, wrote test cases at the end, and the code ran correctly. I still got rejected. The…
- Phone Screen on Designing a Pub/Sub Signaling SystemCandid Health · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
I recently interviewed with Candid Health, a healthcare insurance startup. I basically couldn't find any specific interview reports for this company on the forum. Afterwards I used Claude to dig through Glassdoor and found some related info. The question I actually got in the phone screen mostly matched what I had found. The question is roughly: implement a signaling system, which you can think o…
- Phone Screen Rejected After a File System Question Ran Over TimePerplexity · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
This was a question already reported on the forum: a file system problem. I got through the first two parts basically on the first try. The interesting thing was that the interviewer kept interrupting me while I was writing, asking what this function does and why I wrote it that way. I said it would be clear once I finished writing. When I was done I walked him through it with an example, and he…
- Phone Screen Where You Choose Whether to Use AIRippling · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
This was the first technical interview after HR screen. The interviewer asked me do I want to use AI or not, and said if I picked AI I would get a harder question. I chose not to use AI and this was the question I needed to solve in 45 minutes: Design a delivery-driver payment system add_driver(driver_id, usd_hourly_rate) — register a driver with an hourly rate. record_delivery(driver_id, start_t…
- Phone Screen with Two Easy Questions, Onsite Invite a Week LaterLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026In progress
I mass-applied to a position at the end of September, and also asked a person or two for referrals. The strange thing is that the referrals all went nowhere, and the one I applied to cold is the one that moved forward to an interview. The interviewer was pretty laid-back, maybe it's the company culture. They asked me what times I could interview, then disappeared for three or four days. Eventuall…
- Pluggable Logger Phone Screen, Rejected After Using CursorRippling · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
Ran into a new question. / Your task is to build a simple logging tool for an application. The core requirement is that the Logger should support several different log handlers, and it should be easy to add new log handlers in the future without modifying the core Logger class. Implement these first: Filter handler: before printing, remove all occurrences of a (configurable) string from the log m…
- Power Day with Behavioral, Case Study and Agentic CodingCapital One · Software Engineer · New Grad · Onsite · Oct 2026
Sharing a recent Capital One TDP Power Day interview report. The Power Day had three rounds in total: Behavioral, Case Study, and Agentic Coding. The Behavioral round was pretty standard, basically all classic BQ. As long as you prepare a few projects ahead of time and tell the stories clearly with the STAR framework, you should be fine. Teamwork, conflict, and failure are especially worth prepar…
- Proctored 90-Minute OA with Three QuestionsVisa · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Online Assessment · Oct 2026
Format: three questions, 90 minutes. It is proctored, you have to keep your camera on, and they record your screen too. Given a String, return the number of words in it. Example: He has 1 million do[[ars, isnt he? The steps in the problem statement are: first split the String on spaces into words, then throw out any word that contains digits or symbols other than punctuation (comma, period, quest…
- Receipt OOD Coding Round, 30 Minutes, RejectedPlaystation · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
The technical interview was the first coding round of the second round, with 2 SDEs. It leaned more toward OOD. You're given a string stream of lots of items and have to process them into a receipt. There were four requirements: 1. Print the items one by one with each item's price, and on the last line the total of all prices. 2. Consolidate quantities by item type, for example three cheeses beco…
- Rejected on My First C++ Interview, a Merge K Sorted Lists VariantNuro · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
Lately I've been trying to adjust how I deal with failure. A yoga teacher told me a while back, "Rejection is redirection." Getting rejected might also be a reminder to change direction. I also read about someone who didn't get into the company they loved the first three times and finally made it on the fourth try. Maybe I'll move on to other opportunities, or maybe I'll try Nuro again after I've…
- Rejection Email, Then a Hard Optional Take-home I FailedImbue · Software Engineer · Take-home Project · Oct 2026Rejected
Timeline Day 1: I applied. Day 2: I got a rejection email saying my background/skillset was not a close enough match for what they need. The same email also offered an optional take-home: if I passed it, I would go straight into the interview process and skip the first coding round. I filled out a Typeform (name and email), and within a day MarioHR sent me the assessment link. Format The platform…
- Research Talk, Model Questions and a Fishing Pond Coding ProblemByteDance · Machine Learning Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
First was a self-introduction, then I introduced my research. He said I could share slides if that would make things clearer. I happened to be preparing my proposal recently, so I shared my slides, and it definitely felt better than just talking through it. He asked some questions based on my work, normal follow-ups. Interestingly, he also brought up jev and asked whether I follow it. Then on the…
- Rude Hiring Manager Cut Me Off and I Hung UpCostco · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
Just finished my Costco interview. [Warning] If you're interviewing for the Costco e-commerce team, stay away from this team. The manager who interviewed me was disgusting, and I'd guess this team's reputation is probably already ruined by him. He started by introducing himself as the manager of some team and said this position was under him. Then it was my turn. I said I worked as a frontend eng…
