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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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- Senior Software EngineerRillet · Software Engineer · Oct 2026
I had a pretty strange interview experience and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced something similar. The first round was described as a pair-programming / Test-Driven Development exercise. The task was very simple: take an amount, such as 1200, divide it across 12 months, and make sure the resulting values were correct. I followed the TDD approach from their preparation guide: wrote th… Technical Screen 0 by UsualWinter Previous 1 2 3 ... 226 Next What are interview experiences? An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you. How to read them Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one. Share your own Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the detai
- Software Developer InternIBM · Software Developer · Intern · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Offer
I got asked in-depth questions about tools and technologies listed in the role (and my experience using them). They really just wanted to see if I had some familiarity, as well as how good I was at seeking out answers (I said I don't know to a couple of questions, but explained the approach I would take to figure it out). No live coding. This is team dependent though so take it with a grain of sa…
- Splitwise Question in the Tech Screen, Ran Out of Time on the Follow-upPinterest · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
Their DE role is titled SDE too, and the interview process is the same as the SDE one. I prepared a dozen or so questions from interview reports, but I didn't prepare this one. I stumbled my way through writing it, and the interviewer gave me a lot of hints. I blame myself for not preparing enough. I just moved on. The Splitwise question, the one listed for Pinterest. It is exactly the same probl…
- System Design for a Real-Time Trivia Battle Royale PlatformOpenAI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026
Sharing the system design question from one round of my OpenAI technical interview. The question was given on the spot, and the design below is my solution. Happy to discuss. Question Design a real-time trivia battle royale platform: dozens to a hundred or so players join a room, questions are released round by round, and each round eliminates the players who answer wrong and the slowest player.…
- Technical Screen with Bloom Filter and Payment Idempotency DebuggingMercor · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
Almost all of these were questions I had already seen in interview experience posts! Worst sorting algorithm: I talked about enumerating every permutation and checking whether each one is sorted. Coffee shop: A and B each buy two cups of coffee. What is the probability that A's two cups taste better than B's two cups? There are 1M user_ids. How do you efficiently check whether an id exists, and a…
- Test-Driven Pair Programming Phone ScreenOde · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
It looks like there's no Ode interview report on the forum yet. The company used to be Fractional AI and is now Ode with Anthropic. From talking with the interviewer, I felt they are more like a tech consultant. The interview format was very new to me: test driven pair programming. I do the talking and the interviewer does the writing. The task was to implement a set in Java. We started from the…
- Three Back-to-Back Onsite Rounds, Rejected the Next DayRobinhood · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026Rejected
10/6: back-to-back 3 rounds. 1st: project deep dive. 2nd: system design, a job scheduler. 100,000 job definitions, 10,000 concurrent job runs, all cron jobs, no immediate run, at-least-once guarantee. I get the feeling the interviewers also prepare from stuff they find online. I followed a popular online breakdown of this problem and added a schedule entity, and the interviewer questioned why it…
- Three Onsite Rounds, Rejected Three Days LaterNVIDIA · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026Rejected
After I passed the one phone screen round, they told me to go straight to the onsite. There were only three rounds in total, which made me realize I wasn't going to be that lucky, and sure enough, three days after the interview I was told I was rejected. The first round was straight to a director: BQ plus a deep dive. He felt like a smiling tiger, rambling about this and that, and then suddenly s…
- Three Rounds from C++ and DevOps Basics to LRU CacheAMD · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026
Round 1 I was asked about my experience with DevOps teams. The difference between a const variable and a static variable in C++. What is a database? How do you quickly retrieve data from a massive amount of data? The principles and concepts behind red-black trees (RB tree) and tries (prefix trees). Using Jenkins and its plugins. How to efficiently read/fetch a huge log file (How to fetch large lo…
- Three Rounds of Graphs, System Design and Leadership PrinciplesAmazon · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
I interviewed with the Agentic AI security product team under AWS. The location is Austin. Every round was 1 hour. Round 1 was a DAG topological sort. It was pretty good, pretty basic. Round 2 was another directed graph problem. This team really likes graph problems. It was something like working out what you need to make a cake, and it is very similar to a LeetCode problem. Round 3 was a traditi…
- Three System Design Rounds and a Director RoundNVIDIA · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026In progress
I interviewed last Friday. There were four rounds, and in the first three the interviewers were all senior SDEs, with one system design question per round: A task scheduler Implement a version-controlled download service. For example, if you want to download python2.7 and you find that your machine is missing a few of its dependency packages, you have to download those as well. I thought about th…
- Three-Part Sliding Window Coding RoundOpenAI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026
A few days ago I had a technical interview at OpenAI. The coding round had this multi-part problem, so I'm sharing the problem statement and my solution. Part 1: Recent Interaction Count Implement an in-memory, single-threaded chat session analytics service. The input is a live interaction log stream whose global ts is non-decreasing. Each log entry has: user: str, chat: int (unique within each u…
- TPM Behavioral Questions and a 10-Minute Ticket Grooming ExercisePlaystation · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
These are the behavioral questions from the TPM round. There were two TPMs, teams: what is the most complex thing you've worked on what environment makes you thrive what do you value at a job what do you do for fun, Then there was a 10-minute ticket grooming exercise. They gave the requirements: the PlayStation Store is removing the 12+ age rating and adding a pending age rating, and you, as the…
- Two Coding Rounds, System Design on Inventory, Waiting on ResultsInstacart · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026In progress
While preparing I kept grinding system design, and it turned out my coding wasn't as fast as I thought it would be. One round was "Calculate Equation Expression": you're given a set of variable assignments and have to compute the value of a specified variable. Part one: the right-hand side is either a number or another variable, so you just recurse down. Part two adds addition and subtraction, an…
- Two Phone Screens, Handwritten Onsite Code, Verbal OfferGoldman Sachs · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026Offer
A recruiter reached out to me and kept checking whether I minded being in the office 5 days a week (I told them several times that Amazon is 5 days too, so I'm hardly in a position to mind). First there was a 40 minute screening: write 2 SQL queries and fix a Java Spring API (I honestly could not figure out why the last two tests were failing). Camera on and screen recording the whole time. I loo…
- Two-Question OA on Array Simulation and GreedyJ.P. Morgan · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Oct 2026
The OA had two coding questions in total. Overall difficulty was Easy to Medium, mainly testing Array Simulation and Greedy. The specific questions: Dropped Requests (Array Simulation): you are given an integer array. A positive integer means adding that many server threads, and -1 means a request comes in. Each request uses up one thread, and if there is no thread available the request is droppe…
- Vanta onsiteVanta · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Oct 2026Rejected
First day was system design and leadership sessions. System design was a simple DAU and MAU tracking in an existing system, I gave a pretty complete solution, however, there were some parts where the interviewer was getting confused on where the data was being stored and why. I'd suggest keeping the solution very simple as it seems like that is what they were looking for. Leadership session was p…
- 10-Minute Resume Grill, Then First Missing Positive in O(1) SpaceGoogle · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The interview started right on time and went straight into an intense 10-minute resume grill. The interviewer homed in on my recent backend work, specifically asking detailed questions about the Kafka streaming architecture and Redis caching implementations from my previous internship in the Platform Cloud org. They also dug into the technical trade-offs I made when building Bastion, focusing hea…
- 30-Minute Rapid-Fire Technical Screen, Rejected After Three QuestionsMercor · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The first round at Mercor was a 30-minute live technical interview. It was rapid-fire Q&A, where you try to answer as many questions as possible. I only got through 3 questions, so I didn't pass. The first question was to explain in detail a sorting algorithm faster than O(n^2). I gave merge sort. The second question was to give one slower than O(n^2). For brute force you can shuffle and then com…
- 60-Minute CoderPad Maze Crawl Over HTTP, No PassRamp · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Format: 60 min, live coding in CoderPad. Problem: You're given a base URL for a "maze" served over HTTP. A GET on the base URL returns JSON with a list of next step IDs: You then GET base_url/{step_id} for each step, which returns more next steps. You need to explore until you find the exit. Things to handle: Dead ends: {"next_steps": []} Flaky server: some requests return Service Temporarily Una…
- 60-Minute Merkle Tree Phone Screen, Finished Everything and Still RejectedCursor · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Around the start of September I did a 60-minute phone screen with Cursor. After Cursor merged with SpaceX AI it got renamed to SpaceX AI. The problem was writing a Merkle tree. You have to build a Merkle tree to represent a file system, write get_hash, and write diff to compare 2 trees. You have to write all the tests yourself. The logic is the same as a Merkle tree, except a node can have N chil…
- 90-Minute OA With 4 MC and 2 Coding QuestionsNetflix · Machine Learning Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
I just finished the Netflix MLE Intern OA. It was timed at 90 minutes, with 6 questions total: 4 multiple choice and 2 coding. Below are the topics I remember. I don't fully remember the exact wording or details anymore, but I hope this helps others preparing for the same OA. The multiple choice questions were fairly basic overall. The topics I can recall: Bayes' formula; simple calculations invo…
- A "Debugging" Round That Was Really a Key-Value Store Without a DictionaryEase · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Implement a key value store without a dictionary or set. I was told that this round was going to be a debugging session. The interviewer gave the question above. Mistakes that I made: I did not start with a class definition. The interviewer pointed it out, so I eventually started with a class definition. The interviewer kept asking me about cache collision. I raised an exception for the cache col…
- A 15-Minute AI Recruiter Screen at 1.5x SpeedTesla · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Sep 2026
Recruiter round — they sent me an AI link, about 15 minutes. Going in, it was an AI with a really fast speaking speed, roughly like watching a normal video at 1.5x. This position wasn't really a match for my direction, so I answered kind of randomly. This position requires using Go, Java, Spark, Elasticsearch to build distributed systems — talk about your project experience with these How do you…
- A 45-Minute System Design Screen on Prior Authorization WorkflowsLatent Health · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Role: Software Engineer (interviewer said they're targeting senior level) Round: System design phone screen Duration: 45 minutes (~5 min intros, ~35 min design, ~5 min candidate Q&A) Format: Screen share + Excalidraw (bring your own whiteboard tool — have a link ready) Background (given by the interviewer, ~4 minutes) Latent Health's first product is in the prior authorization (PA) space. The int…
- A 90-Minute AI-Assisted OA and Next-Day RejectionInstacart · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026Rejected
I took the Instacart Full-Stack Engineer Assessment on Codesignal on September, after referred by an employee of the company. It was similar to what posted in the platform here: 5 questions, 90 minutes. Two questions involved chatting with the AI to get the requirements. Two AI assisted Coding with Claude Code, and One bug fixing question withouot AI. There was a tab that showed the live results…
- A Confusing Camera-Logging API ScreenVerkada · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
This one was exactly the same as another report I'd read on here. The interview itself was nice, though the interviewer spent a good chunk of time just explaining the problem. The gist of it: the cameras generate some logs, and we needed to implement a middle-layer API server so that users could communicate with the cameras (sending requests and sending logs). We didn't need to worry about where…
- A Deep Dive on the Classic Orderbook ProblemCitadel · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
This was my second round for the Citadel SWE intern process. The technical part was the classic orderbook problem. The question was the classic orderbook problem. Problem description: Design and implement an order book data structure that maintains order records containing the exchange name, price, quantity, and side (bid or ask). It needs to support three core APIs: add(exchange, price, quantity…
- A Dismissive Interviewer and Workflow System DesignQualified Health · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
I generally don't like judging interviewers or companies, but this company was pretty disgusting. Right from the start, they said that if I didn't interview well, I'd be kicked out early, in the middle of the interview. The person who came in was a technical team lead, looking arrogant. HR was out of their mind and scheduled him for two rounds in a row, one behavioral and one system design. He wa…
- A Downlevel After Passing the Take-homeAffirm · Data Analyst · Senior+ · Take-home Project · Sep 2026In progress
In July, a kind younger alum referred me for Full Stack Analyst II. In early August, HR contacted me to say that role was gone and asked whether I'd consider another Senior Analyst role. After that, it was one step each week: HR call -> hiring manager interview -> take-home. The HM case: Analyze what could have caused the delinquency rate to jump in the past quarter. The take-home: What product a…
