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
- Passing a Difficult Remote Interview ProcessOracle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
An Oracle IC3 applicant describes four remote interviews scheduled across a Thursday morning. Two sessions were coding interviews, alongside behavioral and design discussions. During the first coding session, the interviewer could not access the shared coding platform, so the applicant shared their screen. The author reports unclear retry requirements, additional constraints introduced after impl…
- Patterns from Seventeen ReportsHarvey · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
The author summarizes 17 Harvey interview reports from March through September 2026. Technical screens reportedly centered on spreadsheet formulas or text highlighting, with attention to dependency cycles, evaluation timing, and whole-word matching. Onsite coding examples included an in-memory filesystem, expression evaluation, citation highlighting, and duplicate-file discovery with symbolic-lin…
- Payment Queue Visibility Timeouts and Concurrency RacesSocure · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Backend/SDE Coding I recently interviewed for a Backend/SDE role. The coding problem leaned toward backend work and concurrency. The problem was to implement an in-memory payment queue providing submit, receive, and ack. Requirements: submit adds a message. receive gets the next message. After a message is received, other consumers cannot get it during the visibility timeout. ack deletes it. If t…
- Phone Screen and Four Onsite RoundsCharta Health · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Technical Phone Screen Rate limiter. Onsite Round 1: Coding Given a node, find its in-order successor. The description of the successor was the node with the smallest value among all nodes whose values are greater than the given node's value. Round 2: System Design Design a system that generates the corresponding output for a given input. Similar inputs should also be able to generate the same ou…
- Phone Screen Building a Least-Load Job DispatcherCresta · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Write a Job Dispatcher-Executor system. You are tasked with implementing a simple job dispatcher that distributes incoming jobs to a pool of executors (i.e., workers). Each job is represented as an integer (its ID), and executors are dynamically added and removed during runtime. You must define two classes: Executor – Represents a worker that can accept jobs. LoadBalancer – Maintains a list of ex…
- Phone Screen Building an Excel set_cell/get_cell in Three ScopesHarvey · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Another Excel set_cell and get_cell problem. It starts out really simple and then ramps up step by step, and time was still really tight while writing it. Scope 1 Implement a simple Excel. You need and In step one, set only takes numbers, no formulas, so I'd suggest getting through it fast and not wasting time. Scope 2 Step two adds the ability to set a formula, e.g. set_cell("A1", "=B1+C1+1") or…
- Phone Screen Coding a Host Log Key-Value ParserVerkada · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Interview question summary: Host Log Parser (key-value pairs) Background and goal Background: host systems and IoT edge devices (such as network cameras, access controllers, gateways, and so on) continuously produce runtime logs. Every log line starts with the timestamp of the event, followed by some key-value pairs joined with an equals sign. Goal: write a Python program that reads a log file an…
- Phone Screen Covers Music Recommendation CTR System DesignAmazon · Applied Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
Phone screen Describe yourself What's your PhD topic What's your contribution Describe a time when you deliver under tight timeline ML Given a music recommendation, how would you design a system to convert to CTR rate? How do you embed the song? How do you deal with certain features? How do you deal with extremely sparse feature? Results aren't out yet, will update as I know more. Describe an ML…
- Phone Screen on an Out-of-Order Loan LedgerValon · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
This was the phone screen. It was an OOP coding problem about a bank ledger. I had seen someone mention it on the forum but with no specifics, and if you haven't prepared in advance, time gets a bit tight. The first part is designing a simple dataclass and 2 basic functions, which are just simple addition and subtraction. The second part is the real focus. You design 2 functions that handle the 2…
- Phone Screen Rejection After a Bug-Free LRUApple · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
AES team. The role was posted by someone on the forum (I don't know whether they were the hiring manager), but I applied on my own, and the recruiter reached out very quickly. The phone screen was with one interviewer. For the first thirty minutes it was behavioral questions plus a project deep dive, and I got affirmed on all sorts of things. After that came LRU, bug free, and it ran with the rig…
- Phone Screen with Spiral Matrix and a Blocker Follow-upTemu · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I just finished my Temu phone screen. First round (coding): The problem was a variant of a 2D matrix problem. Part one: given an m x n matrix, output all the values in the matrix in spiral order (clockwise, from the outside in). It's a classic, similar to LC 54 Spiral Matrix. Follow-up: what if the matrix has some blockers (obstacles)? During the traversal, whenever you hit a blocker you have to…
- Phone Screen, Googlyness, and Two Graph-Heavy Onsite RoundsGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Phone Interview Given an n x m matrix, the start is (n-1, 0) and the end is (n-1, m-1). The allowed moves are up-right, right, and down-right. Count the total number of paths to the end. Follow-up 1: There are some checkpoints in the matrix. Count the total number of paths that visit all of the checkpoints. Follow-up 2: The checkpoints must be visited in order. Given that every move changes the c…
- Phone Screen: Climb Detection on Elevation Samples, Then Tolerating Partial DescentsStrava · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
Climb Detection Given an array of elevation samples taken at regular intervals, return the [startIndex, endIndex] of the first climb. Return [] if no climb exists. Part 1 — Strict Climb A climb: Starts when elevation begins increasing. Can stay flat. Cannot decrease. Ends at the highest elevation reached during the climb. Example: [3, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 10, 10, 7, 15] → [4, 10] Part 2 — T…
- Pin-Board BFS Phone Screen, All Tests Passed, Still RejectedPinterest · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
This is a question other people have already posted. The input is three parameters. The first one is the pins that belong to each topic board. For example, a travel board has pins for maple leaves, ocean waves, and a lake, and a home board has pins for a bedroom, a living room, and renovation. So one topic covers an array of pins. The second parameter is the starting pin, and the third parameter…
- Positive Feedback, Rejected for a Better Background MatchOpenAI · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Interview experience for an OpenAI team-specific hire. Just giving a little back to the forum. Phone screen: Coding: GPU Credit 2 System Design: Payment System About a week after the phone screen I had an HM chat, and after that I moved on to the onsite. Onsite: Coding: Plant Infection System Design: Design Steam Deep Dive HM Chat (with a neighboring team) The Deep Dive and the HM Chat were both…
- Posthog technical screen/system designPosthog · Product Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Question was basically "how would you implement analytics for a small mom and pop ecommerce site". Interviewer was a bit of a jerk and pushed back on very minute details about how analytics would be gathered in the first place instead of system design. Whatever it says in their guide about this being a conversation is not true (at least for this interviewer). You need to monologue and you get no…
- Power Day with Case, Behavioral, Coding and System DesignCapital One · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026In progress
I just finished the C1 power day. There are already plenty of OA write-ups on the forum so I won't go into that, I'll mainly talk about the four power day rounds as a reference for anyone interviewing later. The four rounds were case, behavioral, coding, and system design. The case was the virtual card number one, which someone has posted about here before. First we talked about the benefits and…
- Product Judgment and a Changed RoleWayfair · Applied Scientist · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
The author describes a Wayfair machine-learning scientist interview beginning with an advertising-bidding case. Virtual-onsite exercises covered homepage module ranking, recommendations sent after a purchase, an AI-assisted bandit simulation, and behavioral questions. The coding session permitted AI tools and web searches with screen sharing, but follow-ups required explanations of bandit strateg…
- QA Questions from an Acquired TeamCisco · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
This was a team from a company Cisco acquired. The questions were mostly about my experience and open questions, and these interviews really come down to luck, so these are just the ones I remember. Everyone was pretty nice and happy to share their own experiences. If you can successfully ping a server, does that mean port 443 is accessible? How do you test a new feature? How do you drive improve…
- Rare Events, Sampling, and Probability CodingWaymo · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
A recruiter contacted me. After screening and a technical screen, I went into four interview rounds. I've made the original questions less specific for others preparing. Data Intuition, first round A new version performs significantly better in offline evaluation, in simulation, but shows no difference after going live. What could cause that? How would you model a rare event using a log form, and…
- Real-Time 3D Playback Design, Then a 2-Hour AI-Assisted BuildApplied Intuition · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
A 30-minute panel. It starts with a self-introduction, but the intro itself isn't the point. The main thing is that you need to explain why you're interested in the company's mission, so look up the mission statement on their website beforehand and talk about it. System design, 45 minutes. It was to build a real-time 3D playback system given logs of data. It's the toy-car modeling question that h…
- Real-Time Robot-Chase System Design, Then a Rejection with No FeedbackAirwallex · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
It was a direct two-round company screen — coding plus system design — and if you pass, the next step is the hiring manager round. The interviewer was based in China, so we could only schedule evening slots. The team is a new one in Seattle building a productivity tool. System Design — a real-time robot-chase mini-game The problem: the player moves around on a 500×500 terrain grid, and different-…
- Real-Time Voting Results for a Halftime SurveyVerkada · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The coding question was LeetCode 36. The system design question felt new to me. I was asked to design a survey system for a Super Bowl halftime show. Each user could vote for one question, with either A or B as the result. There were two requirements: A user should be able to see the real-time result immediately after voting. The host should be able to see the accurate voting result after the eve…
- Reconciliation, a requests 307 Bug Squash, BikeMap and an AI Exercise, No OfferStripe · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Payment / Invoice Reconciliation (problem as I reconstructed it) Part 1: match by the invoice ID in the memo. Parse the payment and invoice strings, use the invoice ID in the payment's memo to find the matching invoice, and return the string the problem specifies. A payment has a payment ID, an amount and a memo; an invoice record has an invoice ID, an amount and a due date. Part 2: add amount ma…
- Recruiter Screen, Then a Data-Pipeline Coding Round and Rapid-Fire LLM QuestionsSiemens · Senior Applied Scientist · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I mass-applied online and roughly two weeks later got an email from a recruiter, scheduling a recruiter phone interview. Recruiter phone interview This round mostly asked about my related background (my experience doing LLM post-training), then three behavioral questions (an end-to-end work experience, a time I failed, a time I disagreed with someone). The recruiter said the team works on Physica…
- Rejected After a TikTok Trust & Safety System Design Round on a Video Moderation PipelineByteDance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Interviewed in June. Second round: system design interview, 1 hour. Project deep-dive (about 20 minutes). System Design — Video Content Moderation System Question: design a simplified video content moderation system. The interviewer scoped it very clearly: I didn't need to design the video upload part — assume there's already a system that pushes uploaded videos to you. What I needed to design wa…
- Rejected After the Onsite Culture ScreenDecagon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
First was a hiring call with Decagon. Then a technical phone screen, which was a shopping cart problem with redo and undo. Next was a system design phone screen, where I had to design security for the Decagon chatbot. The onsite was a culture screen. They asked pretty generic questions like tell me about a project, tell me about a project that went wrong, and how do you use AI. I was rejected imm…
- Rejected at Onsite Coding Over Missing MetricsScribd · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
Interviewed for the content understanding team, mid-level, in June/July. Phone screen Structure: self-intro → why I'm leaving my current company → DB schema + SQL → a small system design question → observability → my questions for them. Schema / SQL: given a many-to-many relationship, design the tables (they wanted a join table with a composite primary key), then write the query. System design: u…
- Rejection After a SnapshotMap ProblemSnorkel · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Snorkel AI rejection report. The interview problem was to implement a SnapshotMap. The prompt gave a fairly long background and API requirements, so the first step was to extract the core data model and operation semantics from the business description. The basic interfaces were put(k, v), get(k), and delete(k), extended with take_snapshot() and get(k, snap_id) to read a key's value from a histor…
- Reschedule Red Flag, Then Five Questions in Under 20 MinutesAgoda · Data Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I applied cold just to see what would happen, and got an OA the very next day (I think it was one SQL question and one Java question, don't quite remember). The phone interview was originally scheduled for last week evening to match their daytime hours, but when it came time, the interviewer's HackerRank was broken and wouldn't open. It got rescheduled last-minute to this week, which felt like a…
