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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
- Two Completed Problems and Unexpected IDE TimeoutsTikTok · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
Someone contacted me through a professional network, so I treated the interview as practice and a chance to see the market. The two questions were LeetCode 159 and 93. I stumbled a little on the problems, but I did write both solutions. Their Python coding IDE was very bad. It timed out several times, which made me think I had written an infinite loop, but the environment was actually just runnin…
- Two Leadership Principles and Two Whiteboard ProblemsAmazon · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
Before the interview, the recruiter scheduled a call and said the interview would focus mainly on two Leadership Principles. The recruiter suggested preparing the related behavioral questions in advance using the STAR format. The first behavioral portion stayed mostly around those two Leadership Principles. After the first question, the interviewer dug further into the trade-off, so that discussi…
- Two Long Screens and a Final-Round RejectionIntuit · Staff Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
Intuit's interview process had two rounds. The process was long, but HR was patient. The final round was a big production too. First round: Coding The interviewer was very nice and kept encouraging me. The first coding problem was to design a rate limiter. Requirement: design a rate limiter that allows five people through during each time period. Then the design was extended: when VIP users arriv…
- Two OAs, Then I Withdrew Over Red FlagsAirwallex · Frontend Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Withdrew
OA 1 Coding: create a task scheduler for asynchronous functions (event emitter) scheduler must execute tasks with the same name one after another multiple tasks with different names should execute concurrently and independently Follow up: cancel the currently running task by name and move on to the next one clear all running and scheduled tasks by name OA 2 System design: design an autocomplete s…
- Two of Four AI-Coding Tasks CompletedLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
I just received a rejection. The feedback was reportedly that the AI-coding round had four tasks and I had only completed two. I'd like to ask everyone, especially people with experience inside LinkedIn: what exactly is expected in this kind of AI-coding interview? Was I led down the wrong path? First round: System design. Design a system to collect user activity, with queries for the last minute…
- Two Optimal Solutions in a 60-Minute ScreenLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
The technical phone screen lasted 60 minutes. There were two interviewers, and both were relaxed and friendly. One was shadowing, while the other led the interview. After a brief introduction, the lead interviewer asked about a project on my resume and went straight into its details. The two coding questions were LeetCode 179, Largest Number, and LeetCode 244, Shortest Word Distance II. For both…
- Two Passed Screens, Filled Openings, and a Virtual OnsiteBloomberg · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
At Bloomberg, you can move forward with at most two teams at the same time, and each team's phone screen is independent. Basically, one job posting corresponds to one opening, and those openings fill pretty quickly. I passed both phone screens, but both openings had been filled. The recruiter helped forward my resume to a sister team of one of those teams that was hiring, so I didn't need another…
- Two Phone Screens Then a Four-Round OnsiteApple · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
Phone Screen 1: Coding — Implement Hit Counter Implement a Hit Counter that records the time of each request and can query how many hits happened in the last 5 minutes, i.e. within 300 seconds. Main interface: hit(timestamp) records a request getHits(timestamp) returns the number of requests in the past 300 seconds You can use a queue, or a circular buffer aggregated by second. The focus is on ho…
- Two Renamed LeetCode Problems in a 75-Minute OAMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026
Both questions were renamed versions of existing LeetCode problems. Neither was particularly difficult overall; if you're quick with implementation and edge cases, you can finish within 30 minutes: Q1: Count Binary Substrings LeetCode problem: LC 696, Count Binary Substrings (Easy). Topics: Two pointers / counting adjacent runs, or run-length encoding. Approach: Count the lengths of consecutive r…
- Two Tech Screens, Three Onsites and a Silent Coding InterviewerOtter.ai · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
Tech Screen - 1 LC 2654 with one of the SDEs from the company. The focus was on executing code so that it compiles, not a lot of focus on edge cases etc. I was able to get this through with minimal help. Tech Screen - 2 A Senior Manager from the team. I explained project work with a presentation. Onsite 1 Another senior manager doing behavioral questions. Onsite 2 Google Docs system design with a…
- Unexpected Regression Questions and Camera-Event SQLSnapchat · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
The recruiter told me that the technical screen would cover only SQL and statistics and probability. I could not find any new interview reports from this year on the forum. Reports from previous years covered dice probabilities, SQL-finding questions, and similar topics. The questions I actually received were completely different from what I had prepared, so I failed... I am sharing them to help…
- Unprepared System Design Plus an Easy Coding RoundNuro · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
HR reached out and I just did the interview casually without much prep. The phone screen was 45 mins system design + 45 mins coding. System Design The question was to design a self driving car simulation job scheduler system. 10K simulation cases every week, each job has multiple phases, and the phases have dependencies on each other. Each case have several phases Weekly run of 10000 cases I hadn…
- UTC Deployment Windows and a 10-of-11 AssessmentStripe · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Aug 2026In progress
Stripe's online assessment really required a huge amount of code, and the problem was both tedious and long. The problem gives a global UTC timeline covering the 10,080 minutes in one week, along with deployment rules defined in local time. The rules mark deployment as allowed or frozen and each has a corresponding time-zone offset. The task is to find and return the first K qualifying UTC deploy…
- Valeo Software Engineer Interview Experience: C code tracing and embedded protocolsValeo · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2026
I started with an online assessment on HackerRank, which immediately set the tone. It leaned heavily on data structures and algorithms in C, with many code-tracing prompts where I had to predict how snippets would behave and whether they would compile. There were also multiple-choice questions on embedded systems and communication protocols, especially UART, SPI, and I2C. After the assessment, I…
- Variadic Screen, Phrase Search and a Podcast Design LoopConfluent · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
I'm in Canada, interviewing for Senior I. Their old careers site has been shut down and you now have to apply through IBM, otherwise nobody pays any attention to you. It seems to be a transition period right now and the internal hiring pipeline is a bit of a mess. In two of my interviews, the interviewer didn't know they had to log into Teams, which threw things off. Screen: the classic isVariadi…
- VersionedArray, Interview-Scheduling APIs, and a Behavioral Round with the ChiefTrueFoundry · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026
Round 1 Given a sequence of words written using a scrambled alphabet, determine whether the strings are sorted in ascending lexicographic order. The input is a string array (e.g. cat, bat, tab) plus a sorted char array giving the alphabet order (e.g. C, B, A, T). Return true or false. Design a VersionedArray class that implements the following interface: Init: pass in a length to initialize the a…
- Virtual Onsite with Top-K URLs Design, HTML Parser and LRU CacheApple · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026
System design: Top-K trending URLs Design a system that surfaces the top K most-visited URLs over a time window. Clarify first: the window (last hour vs. last 24h), how fresh results need to be, exact vs. approximate counts, and read vs. write volume. Ingestion: click or visit events go to a stream (Kafka), partitioned by URL hash. Counting: stream processors keep per-URL counts in tumbling or sl…
- Virtual Onsite, Then the Req Was CancelledMicrosoft · Applied Scientist · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026No response
This was a team under Microsoft MAI working on a web data platform, not the superintelligence team. The role was Principal Applied Scientist. The phone screen was mostly ML fundamentals and my background. They focused on data-related questions, and there were a few design questions too. Virtual onsite: What HR listed for each round did not quite match the actual interviews. Basically every round…
- Weird Phone Screen with BQs, Array Sum Coding and InMail System DesignLinkedIn · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
Sharing a pretty weird LinkedIn phone screen. A recruiter reached out in early September and set up a 20-minute call. We briefly talked about my background, the target role and salary, and then the phone screen got scheduled. Phone screen: 1 hour. It started with about 5 minutes of intro. I got interrupted before I even finished my self-introduction. Overall it felt like the interviewer wasn't ve…
- WTW Financial Analyst interview with actuarial knowledge assessmentWTW · Financial Analyst · HR Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
I sent in my CV, then had a short telephone personality interview. That was followed by an in-person round on actuarial knowledge and an aptitude test in the same area. The process had three clear stages and seemed designed to filter quickly on technical fit. The first step was more about personality, but the later stages put pressure on my actuarial fundamentals. By the in-person assessment, the…
- ZF Group Software Engineer Interview Experience: Mapping prior work to the roleZF Group · Software Engineer · Aug 2026
Before anything formal happened, the process focused on my fit for the role. I had to write down what I had done previously and explain how it mapped to the job description, including how I solved problems in my field and why that experience would matter going forward. The interview kept returning to how my past work connected to the position. I described how I approached problems, managed time t…
- 30-Minute Phone Screen with a Code-Reading QuestionEliseAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
Format: 30 min video call. Mostly behavioral and experience questions, then a short code-reading exercise at the end. Questions: Tell me about yourself What are you looking for in a new role? Talk about a technical thing you've implemented at a previous company, including the technical decisions. What was the hardest part about that? What's something your previous engineering team didn't do well?…
- 30-Minute Recruiter Chat, Rejected the Next DayRippling · Software Engineer · Senior+ · HR Screen · Jul 2026Rejected
I got a reach-out email from their recruiter and we scheduled a 30-minute quick chat. The HR person was 5 minutes late, but it was no big deal, I've seen this a lot. After she joined she said she wouldn't turn her camera on, and told me I didn't have to either. Then we got started. Intro and work experience She first asked me to introduce myself, and I went over my work history. Then she asked me…
- 75-Minute Malloc Screen, CoderPad Crashed, Advanced AnywayOpenAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026In progress
There's not much to say about the question itself — it's just malloc. But the interview process wasn't quite what I imagined, so I'm sharing it for everyone's reference. The interviewer's background looked very, very strong. After reading the question, I went with the standard interview-report format and started with first-fit. The interviewer pressed for a ton of detail — what data structure to…
- 75-Minute Phone Screen with Train/Test Error Analysis and K-Means from ScratchLyft · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026In progress
75 min. The first part was ML. They gave me 5 sets of training/test error and I had to analyze the possible causes. The cases included training high / test low, training low / test high, both low, and both high. I hadn't prepared for the training high / test low case and got stuck for a bit. The interviewer hinted that the train and test data might have different distributions, or that the traini…
- 90-Minute Online Assessment, Four-Level Bank Transfer ProblemAirbnb · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Jul 2026
I just finished the Airbnb online assessment. I'm an experienced hire switching jobs, not a new grad. The problem is like transferring money between bank accounts, split into four levels, 90 minutes total. It's the same one that was in earlier interview reports on the forum. Level 1 is implementing create and add credit. Level 2 is instant transfer, and outputting the top k. Level 3 is being able…
- A 90-Minute OA With a 4-Level Working Hours Register ProblemAirbnb · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Jul 2026
Time limit was 90 minutes, four levels total. Implement a Working Hours Register: employees badge in and out of the office, and the system records their working hours, with support for promotions, salary calculation, and bonus-period management. Level 1: Basic CRUD — add an employee, badge an employee in and out, query an employee's total hours worked. Level 2: Sort employees by hours worked and…
- A 90-Minute OOD/State-Machine OA on CPU Core CoolingOptiver · Software Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Jul 2026
I recently finished this company's Summer SDE Intern OA, so I'm writing this post to give back to the community. There were two parts in total. One part was a HackerRank OA (90 minutes), an OOD / state machine simulation problem — a puzzle game kind of like Tower of Hanoi. Problem overview Implement an OverheatPreventionController class to simulate and manage the temperature and cooling state of…
- A CodeSignal Bug Hunt in GoZipRecruiter · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026Rejected
I haven't seen a ZipRecruiter MLE interview report on the forum before, so let me share my first-round experience: The recruiter told me it would be on CodeSignal, using some obscure language to find a bug, and that I could ask the interviewer syntax-related questions. The interviewer was a senior software engineer with 4 years at the company. He introduced himself first, then had me introduce my…
- A Community-Compiled Guide to the OA, Technical, and Values RoundsAnthropic · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
Anthropic's SWE interview process breaks into three main parts: an online assessment (OA), one to two technical interviews, and a values/culture interview. This guide compiles experiences and community info from multiple candidates, in the hope that it helps people who are preparing. Timeline The whole process moves pretty slowly. Multiple candidates report gaps of 2-3 weeks between rounds. A typ…
