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
- A Final Onsite with No Break Between InterviewsSchwab · Java Developer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026
After I talked with the recruiter, there was no phone interview. They scheduled the final onsite directly. I live locally and the office was not far from my current company, so I took half a day off and drove over for the interview. Interview schedule First, I spent 45 minutes talking with the hiring manager. It was mainly about understanding my background and answering behavioral questions. Next…
- A Five-Round IC2 Loop With an AI/Coding RoundLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Elimination Round Maximum Depth of Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal Round 1 – DSA Max Points on a Line / Max Collinear Points Minimum Length Substring Round 2 – AI + Coding LRU Cache with Counters Given different workloads, predict and calculate the cache's hit/miss ratio. This round required combining coding with reasoning about AI/system behavior. Round 3 – Hiring Manager Behavioral int…
- A Full-Stack CodeSignal Challenge With No Tests to Check My WorkInstacart · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026Rejected
I recently completed an Instacart CodeSignal assessment that was very different from the usual LeetCode-style rounds. It was a full-stack repository-based assessment, and some sections required me to have conversations with an AI "Product Manager" before making changes. Very annoying. Because unlike other CodeSignal rounds there are no tests to test against!! So I had no idea how well I did and u…
- A Graph Pursuit Problem in the First RoundZipHQ · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The author reports being rejected after a first-round Zip interview focused on a pursuit game in a finite undirected graph. Two players know each other’s locations and can move to an adjacent room or stay still, with the evading player acting first. The question concerned how long capture could take. After the applicant struggled, the interviewer suggested comparing travel distances from the two…
- A Merge Intervals Question and a Curveball Follow-upAim Intelligent Machine · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
This is a startup building autonomous excavators. I felt like I wasn't really a match for it, but a recruiter reached out, and since the job market is rough right now, I figured I'd use it as practice. The role is senior, and they have an office in Bellevue. I first got a hardware guy who spent a while asking why I was considering their company and stuff like that. I told him there wasn't really…
- A Recruiter Screen and Nonnegotiable Offer TermsAnthropic · Data Scientist · HR Screen · Sep 2026In progress
I applied online among lots of other applications, then only heard from a recruiter a month later. When I went back to look for the job description, the posting was already down... I asked her for the job description, but she didn't send it either. There were also more questions than in a typical recruiter round. Why Anthropic? Why are you a good fit? Why leave your current company? Why AI compan…
- A Rough Technical Round Got the Next Day CancelledVanta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
All of this had come up before. Coding: Implement a command line tool, uniq, with global uniqueness. Follow-up: what if the memory can't hold the entire hash table? SD: Metrics for most viewed URLs / subscription conversion rate of their web app. I didn't do well on the technical round, and the interview scheduled for the next day was cancelled outright. Feedback from the recruiter: Overall the t…
- A Rushed 30-Minute Screen on Sorting, Probability, and a Cache Race ConditionMercor · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The interviewer was a principal from Caltech. He talked fast and used a lot of technical jargon, like a college professor would. It was rushed, only 30 minutes. Explain a sorting algorithm better than O(N^2). Merge sort — recursively split the array into left and right halves until there are only 2 elements left, then merge by inserting the smaller of the two into a new array and returning it (N…
- A Screen and Four Hiring-Event RoundsMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026
The report describes a senior software engineering interview for Microsoft’s Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud organization. A technical screen in late August preceded a four-round hiring event in mid-September. The screen combined a three-number sum problem with a question about resolving disagreement. The first event round examined a thread-safe executor that preserves task orde…
- A Screen Full of Probability Puzzles and Finance BasicsSquarepoint · Desk Quant Analyst · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Let X and Y be independent Uniform(0,1) random variables. What is the probability that the product is greater than one-half? Imagine we have a deck with 52 cards and play a game: I draw one card randomly, then you draw one from the remaining 51 cards. The higher card wins. If the two cards have the same rank, we return them, shuffle, and repeat the draw until a winner is determined. Who has the h…
- A Three-Part Text EditorDatologyAI · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
DatologyAI is a startup that raised a Series A two years ago and still has not raised a Series B. I went into the interview completely unprepared. The problem was a text editor, and only when I was writing this report did I realize that it seemed to be a question the company asks often. There were three parts. Part 1: Implement adding characters and deleting characters, and print all characters.…
- A Time-Series Pipeline Coding ScreenVoleon · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
After recruiter outreach, the author agreed to interview with Voleon and reports being rejected after a 90-minute machine-learning coding session. The exercise involved a pipeline with roughly five tasks and a CSV dataset containing time-series observations. The author remembers debugging, changing model parameters, running results, and extending the pipeline for inference, but not the remaining…
- A Two-Part Deployment Window Scheduler OA I Couldn't FinishStripe · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026Rejected
On 9/14 I applied to a mid-level role through a referral and got the OA right away. Honestly it was long and a total slog. Even using Claude I couldn't get it done. Problem background: Stripe needs a scheduler to manage service deployment times. Time is represented as minute_of_week, in the range [0, 10079] (a week has 10080 minutes in total). Input: part: "part1" or "part2" inputCsv: an array of…
- A Word-Search Rule Clarified Too LateReddit · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The author reports an unsuccessful Reddit coding screen involving word search. After presenting the task, the interviewer remained quiet while the applicant worked. The author did not confirm the movement rules and implemented a more permissive search than the interviewer expected. A typo also consumed about ten minutes. Although the applicant’s own tests passed, the interviewer said near the end…
- AI Agent Second Round in MandarinTikTok · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
TikTok SWE AI Agent Intern, second-round interview report. This was the second round, and the entire conversation was in Mandarin. I started with a self-introduction, followed by a deep dive into my research project. Fundamentals / business design How HTTPS works. Explain the TLS/SSL handshake process and CA certificate validation in detail. Follow-up: During data transmission, is symmetric or as…
- AI Coding, Reconciliation, and a Debugger That Would Not RunStripe · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
AI coding: It's the rule parser problem from the forum. I used the Opus model and kept talking with the interviewer the whole way through. Honestly, in the moment I couldn't fully understand what the AI wrote either (a lot of the time I have to read Claude's code over and over before I get it, I'm just not that good), but I got the feeling the interviewer was also only half following and just nod…
- AI Debugging and Unclear Coding AssumptionsInstacart · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
The author reports an unsuccessful Instacart backend interview process involving CodeSignal assessments and human-led coding. The first onsite segment included a 90-minute library-application exercise and two hour-long coding interviews. AI was available for the application task, but only to explain code and help localize bugs, not to provide direct fixes. The author says the required changes ult…
- AI Product Engineering Loop With a Take-home Review, CTO Chat, and Build-Uber System DesignLuma AI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Luma is a small-to-mid-size company, currently around 200-300 people, split mainly into research and product. The process is fast and also a bit chaotic: recruiter, take-home, onsite, offer. If the recruiter doesn't get back to you about the next step, you can follow up yourself. TC is very high, they mainly want to be in the same range as OpenAI and Anthropic, but most of it is Series C paper mo…
- AI-Assisted CodingFireworks · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
They asked me to create a referral system that recommends a list of other users for any given user, using the network of all users. The network consists of nodes, and two users are friends if their nodes are connected by an edge. Don't recommend current friends. Base recommendations on mutual friends: A and B are both connected to the same node, but A and B are not directly connected. Second, giv…
- AI-Assisted Coding Round: Build a Flight-Booking Chat Agent in PythonCresta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
You get an api.md doc plus an agent_starter.py file, and you have to use AI assistance to implement an AI Agent that searches for and books flights. The format is a chat dialog. Note: the language has to be Python, and you need to set up the whole project in your own IDE, so make sure you can actually run Python locally first. They'll also give you OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENAI_BASE_URL, and FLIGHT_API_…
- AI-Assisted Onsite Coding on an Expense Reimbursement CodebaseZipHQ · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
It was roughly three small problems. They gave us a codebase, but it had so many files that there was no way to read through all of it, so basically you have the AI read and write everything. It was a simple system for managing company expense reimbursements, with features like monthly expense and budget reports. The first problem was that the monthly report data was wrong, for example someone fi…
- AI-Enabled CodeSignal Screen, URL Shortener, Ran Out of TimePersona · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Format: 60 min on CodeSignal. Using CodeSignal's built-in Claude terminal (kept getting throttled, and very slow). The interviewer evaluates how you scope the work, direct the AI, and verify what it produces, not whether you can type it all yourself. Problem: URL shortener (internal go-links) Build an internal go-link tool, e.g. go.internal/ifd → a Notion page. It's scoped to about 100 users, so…
- AI-Encouraged Pair Programming on an Auto-Refund System, Failed the Next DayShopify · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
I got the interview through a referral. The recruiter emphasized that it's pair programming and that using AI is very much encouraged. It's 75 minutes, and at the start the interviewer shares a repo with the problem statement and the actual questions in it. The problem was to write an auto refund system based on the requirements. It's not LeetCode style, more like a mix of mini system design + co…
- An Agent/RAG System for 200 Documents per SessionQualified Health · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
System design interview question: An Agent / RAG chat system supporting uploads of 200 documents 📌 Core Problem > Design an enterprise LLM agent question-answering system that lets users upload external documents in batches within one session, up to 200 documents, and have real-time streaming question-and-answer exchanges and multi-turn interactions about their contents. 🎯 System Requirements and…
- An AI-Coding Onsite Round, Rejected After System DesignDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Screen interview: Code Craft: Dasher Pay. Didn't feel too hard — just make sure to talk through your approach with the interviewer before you start coding. It's a high-frequency question from the forum. Onsite Round 1: Debugging: Round Robin Load Balancer. Also a forum question. Onsite Round 2: AI Coding. They had me set up a microservice locally on my own machine, specifically to handle abnormal…
- An Ambiguous Recommender Training TaskLinkedIn · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
This was a very strange interview experience. It was the interviewer's first time interviewing, and she asked me to handwrite a binary-classification machine learning loader and trainer. The data was not a real dataset, so I could not write code that would actually run. She asked for pseudocode but did not explain what level of detail she wanted. She also did not clarify what the model was suppos…
- An OA and a Mean-versus-Median Estimation InterviewHudson River Trading · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
I recently finished HRT's OA and first Zoom interview. Sharing the questions here—hope this helps people interviewing later! OA I received the coding OA invitation a few days ago and finished it today. There were three questions: Fancy Number A fancy number is a number that contains only 0 and 1 when written in base 4. Given n, return the count of fancy numbers smaller than n. This probably needs…
- An OA on Budgeted Item PurchasesHudson River Trading · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Input: prices[]: An array of length n, where prices[i] is the price of item i. queries[]: A two-dimensional array whose elements are [start_i, budget_i]. Each query means that only items with indices greater than or equal to start_i may be purchased, with a total budget of budget_i. Rules: Each item may be purchased at most once. The order or positions of the items do not matter; they do not have…
- An Onsite Where the Coding Round Expected You to Use AIRippling · Backend Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Interviewed for a Senior backend role in July. Round 1 — Coding (60 min), AI use explicitly allowed The interviewer (Data Cloud team) opened by saying directly: "The environment has an AI assistant set up, use it the way you normally would at work, just don't let it make every decision for you." Problem: task scheduler. You're given a batch of tasks (description / due date / priority / completed…
- An Unexpected Forecasting Question and a Fast Offer TimelineGoogle · Data Scientist · Onsite · Sep 2026Offer
I signed Google's offer a couple of days ago, though I still have a few other issues to resolve. I'm sharing my interview experience and preparation package, and hoping I can start smoothly. First round Stats: Questions about p-values, simple linear regression, confidence intervals, and similar topics. Data: Compare two vendors' models. There are similar questions in other interview reports. Seco…
