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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
- Explaining an AI System and Solving a Maze with AIMeta · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
This will most likely become a rejection story. At the beginning, I was asked to introduce an AI system I had designed and explain the problem it solved. I stumbled through the explanation, and the interviewer did not seem very satisfied. I probably did not make the project sound impressive enough. Next came AI coding. This really felt like a company going all in on AI, because everything involve…
- Failed System Design, Retake Passed, Now in Team MatchingGoogle · Engineering Manager · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026In progress
I'm currently a founding engineer at a startup, and with the company's prospects looking shaky I decided, on a whim, to put in an application for an Engineering Manager job at Google. I wasn't counting on an offer. My understanding is that most people need a few tries before they get through Google's interviews, and I hadn't prepared at all before applying, so I was starting from behind. That dro…
- Failed the System Design Round, One-Year CooldownLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
Coding: LeetCode "Deadpool" and 272. SD: Post Search. The deep dive mostly focused on how to quickly figure out which posts contain a keyword, how to implement excluding a keyword (for example, a post must contain apple but must not contain banana), and how to rank the returned post results by keyword frequency. AI Coding: a roller coaster passenger-seating problem. You are given how many seats a…
- Feature Flag Design and an AI Coding Round, RejectedStripe · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
I applied for the staff software engineer role. I'm not very strong, and I got rejected very cleanly. After the recruiter screen, they scheduled two rounds of a mini onsite (60 min * 2). The first round was system design. The question was to design a feature flag system, similar to Amazon WebLab. Because I hadn't prepared for it, and I had no systematic approach to open-ended questions, I got stu…
- First Quality Laboratory Account Executive Interview Experience: sales-floor shadowingFirst Quality Laboratory · Account Executive · HR Screen · Aug 2026
After a recruiter call, I spent an in-office day getting a real look at the sales floor. I shadowed a sales rep and saw what the day-to-day work looked like beyond the usual "tell me about yourself" conversation. The process moved quickly after the introduction. My second interview was also in the office. It used a ride-along format: I followed multiple job shadows and then had a focused follow-u…
- Five Chicago Onsite Rounds and a Template RejectionIMC · Hardware Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
A recruiter first found me through a professional network and referred me to IMC. After two phone screenings with a hardware engineer and a machine-learning algorithm engineer, I was invited to the Chicago office for an onsite. The onsite had five rounds, all on the same day, and I met ten interviewers across those rounds. First round: Hardware architecture. I was first given a small program writ…
- Five Onsite Rounds Where Follow-Ups Decide EverythingGoogle · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
I've been lurking for a long time, and this time I picked up a lot of good material from the forum before my own interview, so I'm posting this to give back. I'm using the forum's usual numeric code-names for the problems, so bear with me. Google's pacing is very different from Meta's. Each round is 45 minutes with basically one main question, and the rest of the time is all follow-ups — the inte…
- Five Rounds From Elimination Screen to BehavioralOracle · Backend Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
Elimination Round Given an array and an integer k, find the top k most frequently occurring elements. If two elements have the same frequency, the larger element comes first. Questions about Java collections, PriorityQueue, HashMap, and related knowledge points. Deep dive into projects mentioned in the resume. Round 1 Given a string, split it into exactly three non-empty palindromic substrings. N…
- Five-Round AI Online AssessmentInstacart · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026In progress
I barely scraped by. As far as I can tell, there's currently only one question in the question bank — a library book search/borrowing system. There's already a very detailed writeup of this question in another post, so I'll just add a few of my own thoughts here: For round 1 and round 4, when talking to the AI PM, try to put all your questions into a single prompt and have the AI PM answer everyt…
- Ford Hospital and Research center Software Engineer Interview Experience: one virtual panel with decision-making follow-upsFord Hospital and Research center · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026Offer
The process was direct: a short recruiter call followed by a single virtual panel interview lasting about an hour. The panel mixed technical questions about work I had done with behavioral prompts. They seemed especially interested in how I made decisions, rather than only in what I had done. The experience was structured and not overly drawn out. The depth came through follow-up questions. When…
- Four Back-to-Back Rounds, and I Was Late to the First OneMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Before the interview they gave me two time windows to choose from, morning or afternoon. After I picked one, it was four rounds back to back, about an hour each. Part 1: The process and the questions Round 1 | BQ + quick-fire technical concepts + algorithm The interviewer was a guy based in Pittsburgh. BQ: Have you ever been blocked for a long time? How did you solve the problem and keep moving f…
- Four CodeSignal Tasks and No Reply After Nearly Two WeeksCapital One · Data Scientist · Online Assessment · Aug 2026No response
It has been almost two weeks since I finished, and I have not heard anything, so I probably failed... This was the first interview of my job search, and I never expected to fall at the OA. Looking back, I did not take it seriously enough, did not prepare enough, and was not familiar with this OA format. There are many interview reports on the forum, so I am writing about a few things I had not se…
- Four Coding Questions in the Online AssessmentCapital One · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
Given an array, find the first element whose two adjacent neighbors are both strictly larger. Given 2 arrays with the same length n, calculate the sum of absolute diff for each cyclic t-shift of nums1 with nums2. Return a list of all sums sorted in nondescending order. Given a 2D matrix and a pattern, return the coordinate of the submatrix with the lowest row index and lowest column. The submatri…
- Four Interviews Across Months and Unfinished Team MatchingGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026In progress
I applied to Google quite a while ago, probably in March, and got an interview in May. The process dragged on for a long time. I kept practicing problems, and fortunately I eventually passed, but unfortunately team matching didn't work out. I've now gone to NVIDIA. The first round was online in May. It was a coding question, roughly like this (I asked AI to summarize it): Connected Crop Arrangeme…
- Four Interviews with a Train Fare Calculator and Sliding Window MaxAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Interview #1 — LP + DSA/OOP Leadership Principles behavioral interview, about 10–15 minutes. Then the design question: a train fare calculation system. There is one train line, G → U → H → K → I, and the fare between every two adjacent stations is 1 (for example, G to I costs 4). Implement calculateFare(start, stop) to compute the fare between two stations. Think about OOP/LLD design: where does…
- Four Onsite Rounds, All About the Follow-UpsUber · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Four rounds, questions weren't hard but the pace was really fast Let me lead with the conclusion: Uber's problems really aren't hard, but they move fast. 45 minutes a round, and the interviewer practically wants you to knock out the main problem in 15 minutes so there's a full half hour left for piling on requirements. It felt less like solving problems and more like sitting in a requirements rev…
- Four Onsite Rounds, Two Left UnfinishedUiPath · Frontend Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
Their process was actually pretty fast. Overall it felt pretty average — the questions weren't especially hard, but between chatting about my resume and reading through the problems, I didn't finish several of them. Debugging round: I found a bug in the table sort, which was pretty simple. After that we spent most of the time talking about my experience with AI and harness engineering. Another de…
- Four Rounds from System Design to RAGJ.P. Morgan · Software Engineer II · Onsite · Aug 2026
Round 1: Hiring Manager System design: choose a project you previously worked on, design and explain its architecture end to end, and answer related follow-up questions. Database optimization: given a database table with user_id and region columns and more than one million rows, how would you optimize a query that looks up a specific record? Database indexing. Table partitioning. Sharding. Replic…
- Four-Round Onsite With an AI-Assisted Coding RoundDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
First I got a reach-out from a recruiter, and we set up a quick call to go over the basics and the interview process. Then they scheduled the first technical round. After that round, the process got handed off to another recruiter, who also set up a quick call to go over some basic info, and at the same time scheduled the onsite. The first round was a Code Craft round, 1 hour. The second round wa…
- General Pooling and a Ranking InterviewReddit · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
I applied to a particular team while sending out lots of applications online. The first phone screen was a question from the forum: analyze a spent-hours dataset and predict clicks. Since I had prepared it, the interview went quite smoothly. A week after the interview, I still hadn't heard anything, so I logged into the candidate portal. The position I had applied for was gone, and the interview…
- GlobalFoundries Software Engineer interview with setup and hold questionsGlobalFoundries · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
After the recruiter conversation, I had two engineering-focused technical rounds. The first was with someone on the design side. We went through my resume and academic projects before discussing C. The second was with someone on the verification side and was noticeably tougher. That verification interview focused on fundamentals: asynchronous design, flip-flop behavior, assertions, and setup-and-…
- Google and Netflix L4 Offers Lost to a Visa ProblemGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Offer
TL;DR: There is no big-tech name on my resume and my job title is unremarkable, yet I made it through the Google, Netflix and Meta processes and ended up holding L4 offers from Google and Netflix. My visa status ultimately wrecked both. Below is how I got ready. About me: I was a government contractor for eight years. The job was nothing exciting, but I kept teaching myself new technologies and s…
- Google SWE III Onsite Experience and Team Matching TimelineGoogle · Software Engineer III · Aug 2026
I interviewed for a Google Software Engineer III position. The process included two virtual interviews followed by two onsite interviews. The first virtual round focused on Googliness and behavioral questions. I structured my answers using the STAR framework, and the recruiter later said the feedback was extremely positive. The second round was coding-focused and involved an array problem. I comp… Onsite 1 by Xiaoming
- GPU Credits and a Photo Storage SystemOpenAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
This was my OpenAI software engineer technical screen, adding a recent data point. The coding problem was GPU Credit. I had seen a similar question before, so I finished it almost immediately. The task was roughly to implement a GPU-credit or resource-credit system that supported: Granting a quantity of credits with activation and expiration times. Subtracting or consuming credits at a particular…
- Graph Coding Then a Ticket Booking System DesignByteDance · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
Round 1: Coding The first round was coding. The problems were mainly graph / topological sort related. Overall the difficulty was not especially high; if you prepare graph, BFS/DFS and topological sort normally, you should be able to cover it. Round 2: System Design The second round was system design, and the question was to design a ticket booking system (a system for grabbing tickets the moment…
- Grid Signals and a Blocker-Removal Follow-upGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Given a grid representing a city, it contains the following kinds of entities: Sources (S): Emit signals. Blockers (B): Block signal propagation. Empty cells (.): Signals can pass through freely. Targets (T): Need to receive a signal. Signals start simultaneously from all sources. Each unit of time, they move one cell in each of four directions: up, down, left, and right. Signals cannot pass thro…
- Guidelines Promised Three Rounds, Got Two Algorithm Interviews InsteadNutanix · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
The phone screen just asked a few casual questions, then they sent an OA on HackerRank — 3 questions, an hour and a half total. After I finished it I got the interview, and what was pretty ridiculous is that the guidelines they sent and what the actual interview turned out to be were completely different. The intro said 3 rounds: one coding round, one "Advanced problem-solving coding" round, and…
- HackerRank OA with Two Coding Problems, Then VOMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
Microsoft SWE II OA, HackerRank, two coding problems. I passed and moved on to the VO. [Questions] Q1: Given a string, look at the substrings whose length is in [minLength, maxLength] and whose number of distinct characters is
- HackerRank, Two RAG-Heavy Rounds and an Offer the Day AfterVisa · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026Offer
I joined Amazon in the US in September 2022, straight out of my master's program, and my reviews came back "Exceeds Expectations" two years running. A promotion I was expecting never came through, so I switched teams. My new senior manager looked over my promotion case, saw nothing missing, and intended to put me forward for promotion in March 2026. In January, though, the entire team was laid of…
- Hexadecimal AND and Binary Tree RecursionAkuna Capital · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
This technical interview mainly covered C++ fundamentals, bitwise operations, binary-tree recursion, and dynamic memory management. The questions themselves were not difficult, but there was a strong focus on pointer use, boundary conditions, and low-level implementation details. Bitwise Operation Question: Calculate: Convert both hexadecimal values to binary: After applying the bitwise AND: Ther…
