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
- Failed the TikTok LIVE Phone Screen on Graph ColoringByteDance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The role came from a TikTok HR reach-out. There was no HR call, they only asked about my sponsorship situation over email and then scheduled a 1-hour phone interview. The interview was on HackerRank. I started with a self-introduction, then a behavioral question: tell me about a challenge. After that came a LeetCode problem, Possible Bipartition: > Split a group of n people (labeled from 1 to n)…
- Fast Coding and a Difficult Bar RaiserInstacart · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
The virtual onsite had two coding rounds, one design round, and one bar-raiser round. The coding questions were ones from interview reports, and easier than the versions on the forum. I breezed through both. For the calculate-expression question, the interviewer said in part two that there would always be spaces around the +, =, and - signs, so parsing was straightforward. In part three, the only…
- File Deduplication, Size Checks, and Reference CountsCitadel · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
My first Citadel SWE interview. The interviewer was on the hedge fund side. I gave a brief introduction. Before I had a chance to tell the behavioral stories I'd prepared, he went straight into technical questions. The interview was basically 100% coding and system design. Problem: Suppose a file system contains files with identical contents. For example, /a/b/c.txt and /a/b/e.txt both contain th…
- findBestAnagram, Three BQs, Downleveled from L5 to L4 After R1Google · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
Coding: findBestAnagram For details, see these two posts on LeetCode Discuss: a Google L3/L4 phone screen post Round 2 of a Google SWE II (L3) post BQ: Conflict: Tell me about a time you have to compromise, and how will you act differently after it. Are you satisfied with the result? Did you do anything to make it happen later? Imagine you’re part of the Google Photos team, and your feature detec…
- First Round, Three Coding Questions with a Friendly DQASquarepoint · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The interviewer is a DQA who already works there. The conversation was relaxed overall, the interviewer was easygoing and happy to talk and give hints, and the whole thing felt more like chatting while solving problems. Climbing stairs: each step you can choose from xx ways of moving, and you need to count how many ways there are to reach step n. This maps to LeetCode 70, and DP is enough. There…
- First Technical RoundOracle · Platform Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Round 1: Technical Interview Maximum of Minimums of Every Window Given an array A of size n and an integer x, implement the following steps: Consider every contiguous subarray of length x, or sliding window. Find the minimum value in each window. Return the maximum of all those minimum values. For example, A = [1, 3, -1, 5, 3, 6] and x = 3: The final return value is 3. The main point of the quest…
- Five Behavioral Questions in a One-Way Video InterviewBoston Consulting Group · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
BCG X Forward Deployed AI Engineer, one-way video interview. These were the five questions, that's it. Prep time is unlimited, and you get two recording attempts. Describe your understanding of BCG X in 3-5 sentences (who we are, what we do etc.) and what motivated you to apply. Describe the last analytical tool you taught yourself, why you chose it, how you taught yourself. Please tell me about…
- Five Hard Problems in a 105-Minute OAVirtu Financial · Quantitative Researcher · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Five problems in 105 minutes. The problems are hard difficulty, and some of them are straight LeetCode problems. Time is pretty tight. I got the OA within about two weeks of applying everywhere. Debt Transactions: LeetCode 465. Building Construction: LeetCode 2865. Reaching Points: LeetCode 780. Lifting Weights: Given an array weights of n plate weights and a barbell capacity maxCapacity, choose…
- Five Onsite Rounds from Course Data to ExperimentationLinkedIn · Data Scientist · Onsite · Sep 2026
My LinkedIn onsite had five rounds in total: Data presentation I was given two tables. One showed the current number of LinkedIn Learning courses in each category, and the other showed the number of courses and participants over time. I had to analyze them myself, then make slides and present. SQL + Python For SQL, I was given two experiment tables. One was a cohort table with users, their experi…
- Five Onsite Rounds Including a Live AI Coding ChallengeDoorDash · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Round 1 — Code Craft: Bootstrap / Aggregator API Problem You are tasked with implementing an API that exposes the required information and is as resilient to failures as possible in order to ensure a good user experience. Implement a Bootstrap API that takes a user_id, pulls information from three existing upstream services — Consumer, Payment, and Address — and combines it into a single response…
- Five Rounds from C# LLD to Notification DesignOmnissa · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Round 1: Screening / Practical Coding (HackerRank) This was a practical low-level design coding problem based on a real scenario, and I was required to use C#. Given an existing repository class, I had to implement and complete every method in a Service class so that it passed the test cases. The main focus was how I organized the code, wrote clean code, handled edge cases, and thought through an…
- Five Rounds from Top-K URLs to Log CollectionOracle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Screening Given a massive volume of URL access logs and limited memory, find the global Top K URLs and the Top K most frequently accessed URLs over the past 24 hours. The main focus was system-design thinking, trade-offs, and pseudocode implementation. Round 2 Given an event stream in the format (userId, eventType, timestamp), find the Top 100 users with the most events during the past hour. This…
- Five Rounds, Failed AI Coding and System DesignLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
LinkedIn Senior Infra, five rounds. I failed AI Coding and System Design, so here are some lessons learned (I had AI polish this a bit). I recently finished the interview loop for a LinkedIn Senior Infra role and did not pass, mainly because of AI Coding and System Design. My memory is still fresh, so I'm sharing the questions and my own review, hoping it helps anyone preparing for Infra. Phone s…
- Four CodeSignal Tasks Without a Recruiter CallCapital One · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
The author reports receiving a four-question CodeSignal assessment from Capital One without prior recruiter contact. One task involved a basic array operation, but the author could not recall its details. The other tasks concerned alternating high and low values around a circular array, identifying a smaller pattern within a numeric matrix, and determining whether segments fit on a number line co…
- Four Power Day Rounds and a Virtual Credit Card CaseCapital One · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
I did the four-round Senior Lead AI Engineer Power Day in late September. It felt all right overall. I guess poor performance on the VNC case was why I didn't pass. Round 1 — AI Engineering / System Design Design an Enterprise Agent Platform The interviewer asked a series of AI / agent / platform / system-design questions that were within the scope of my preparation. Round 2 — Technical Case: Vir…
- Four Retention SQL Questions in a 45-Minute ScreenMixpanel · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
Straight to the useful stuff. My Mixpanel Data Scientist phone interview was a SQL screen, around 45 minutes, with someone from the DS team. Table structures, restated as I understood them, roughly like this: users: user_id, signup_date, plan_type, ... events: user_id, event_ts, ... There were four questions, each building on the previous one, all about retention analysis. Q1: How many users had…
- Four Rounds in One Day, Not SelectedMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
The JD said the role is in Windows + Devices, with two teams, WSSI and AI Trust. The interviewer said the role mainly works on privacy and compatibility. There were 5 interviews in total: The first one was a CV + technical questions round, but I think they only asked about my resume and BQ. Then four rounds, all scheduled on the same day. Round 1: BQ + Coding Why Microsoft and why this role The t…
- Four Rounds with Detailed Behavioral QuestionsAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
The author describes four Amazon virtual-onsite interviews for an SDE2 role, each combining behavioral discussion with technical work. The technical topics were dependency ordering and selective reruns, a high-volume inventory-update service, an extensible document-search library, and merging timestamp-ordered event streams without loading everything into memory. Behavioral questions examined inv…
- Four Team Matches and a Verbal Offer After a Long LoopGoogle · Engineering Analyst · Onsite · Sep 2026Offer
A friend started referring me around September 2025. I had a recruiter screen in October, but the HM decided not to interview me. A team I applied to in February this year offered me an interview. The rough timeline: 3/9/2026 Recruiter reached out. 4/2/2026 RRK case, interviewed by a team member. 4/9/2026 Passed. 4/27/2026 RRK case + SQL, interviewed by a team member. 5/11/2026 Passed. 5/22/2026…
- Four-Level Banking System OA, Stuck on Level 3 at 440 PointsAirbnb · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Level 1: Basic banking operations. Needs to support: Level 2: Top Spenders Requirement: rank accounts based on the total value of outgoing transactions Adds something like: Level 3: Scheduled Payments. The system needs to support: schedule payment accept payment The biggest trap here is the timestamp execution order. It's not just "store a record when schedule_payment is called" and that's it. Ev…
- Four-Question OA Where the Rotting-Oranges BFS Ate My TimeCapital One · Software Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026
Posting this a while after the fact. I strongly recommend doing them in the order 1-2-4-3. People on the forum did say 3 was kind of hard, and I got stuck on it for ages. I'd have been better off doing 4. To explain: the easy questions up front take roughly 25 minutes, and then two mediums in 45 minutes is still pretty hard. You're better off getting full points on one of the last two questions..…
- Four-Question OA, Left Q3 Blank and Tripped on the Digit-Swap ProblemCapital One · Machine Learning Engineer · Online Assessment · Sep 2026Rejected
Catching up on a write-up for the C1 AI Engineer OA I did a while back, which I failed. 4 questions total, 1 hour 10 minutes. The first two were really easy. I can't remember what they were, but they were just really easy, you can finish them in 10 minutes. I didn't understand question 3, so I skipped it and went to do question 4, and in the end I had no time to come back to it, so it was complet…
- Four-Round Onsite, Then a Recruiter Who Ghosted MeAirbnb · Data Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Not many interview reports out there, so let me add mine — hope it helps. My recruiter was unreliable and ghosted me right after the interview. One round of OA. The VO (onsite) was four rounds of analytics interviews. OA: The SQL was pretty easy. The Python question gave a list/dict of city housing prices, and I had to find the median price for each city. VO: SQL: Find the top N, then figure out…
- Four-Round VO, Menu Review Design Stuck in Schema Details Until Minute 45, RejectedDoorDash · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
The phone screen was coding plus a project deep dive. The coding was that Dasher Pay question. The interviewer was really nice: right after I finished writing the code, they just told me not to worry, they were passing me. For the project deep dive, the interviewer listened really carefully and asked a lot of questions. The VO was four rounds. Round 1 was AI coding. I think they have two coding q…
- Fractional-Share InventoryRobinhood · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
The author describes a first-round Robinhood coding interview about handling customer trades when an exchange accepts only whole shares. The exercise tracked fractional inventory by symbol, covered purchases and sales, and included orders expressed either in shares or in money. Exchange transactions had to leave each inventory balance nonnegative and below one share after an order. The supplied f…
- Free-Trial Take-home and Four Final Interview RoundsOpenAI · Data Scientist · Onsite · Sep 2026
Take-home assignment + live review take home assignment related to free trial Explore the data, identify key insights, and make recommendations. Deliver a polished and concise slide deck. This is followed by a 1-hour live interview: 20–25 minutes: take home discussion 20–25 minutes: hands on sql 10 minutes: python debug Hiring Manager Interview 1 hour project deep dive with the hiring manager Ons…
- Full Loop, Rejected on the Newly Added AI Coding RoundPinterest · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Phone screen: LeetCode 1055 It was split into two parts. Part 1 only checks whether the target can be formed at all; once that ran and passed, I did the second part. For Part 2 I first tried recursion + greedy, but it had a bug and couldn't guarantee the optimal solution. After fixing that I wrote a recursive version that passed. But the interviewer wanted an iterative approach, so the rest was t…
- Full Onsite Loop Plus My AI Coding Interview PlaybookMeta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Most of the questions were the classic, well-worn ones you'd already find on the forum. Phone Leetcode easy + mid Onsite 2 AI coding rounds + 2 AI system design rounds + 1 BQ AI coding 01: Friend system: Implement a friend recommendation algorithm Given data: a list of users, a list of friendships (user-user pairs) Design a strategy to recommend new friends to a user (e.g., search for friends of…
- Game Logic, Referral Credits, and Chat DesignDatabricks · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
The report describes two coding sessions and a chat-system design discussion in a Databricks onsite. One coding exercise involved a turn-based board game, including player switching, board output, and correctly ending wins or draws. Its follow-up introduced automated play. The other exercise tracked account credits associated with referrals, queried accounts meeting a threshold, and extended cred…
- GPU Systems, Inference, and an OfferAMD · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Offer
The author reports receiving an AMD GPU software engineering offer after interviews for a Toronto/Markham team. Recruiter outreach led to an initial screen and an extended hiring-manager conversation. An in-person onsite followed roughly two weeks after availability was requested, and the offer arrived about three weeks after that visit. The four onsite sessions covered inference systems, agent a…
