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
- Epic Software Engineer interview with HR call and coding assessmentEpic Systems · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Apr 2026
My process started with a phone call with HR. It had a resume and behavioral focus, with some discussion of my background and questions about how I think and present myself. After that, I completed an assessment test. That was clearly the hardest part. It wasn't described as a single coding-only challenge, but the coding section pushed me the most. The test had to be completed before or after the…
- Epic Software Engineer interview: assessment funnel with math, logic, and codingEpic Systems · Software Engineer · Other · Apr 2026
I started with a basic phone interview about my resume and why I was interested in the role and company. After that, I completed an assessment with several parts: a personality section, math and logic sections, and coding. Once I finished those, I had a longer final interview that combined a case study with behavioral questions. The final conversations felt fairly normal. They focused mostly on f…
- Experian Data Analyst interview: prerecorded video and basic online assessmentExperian · Data Analyst · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
My interview experience started with a prerecorded video component. It was easy to step into and felt more like a low-pressure way to introduce myself than a live interrogation. There was also an online assessment focused on basic skills. For the video section, I had a short window to answer typical interview questions. I used that time to talk about my interests and fit. The process moved quickl…
- Experian Software Engineer interview: timed Q&A with 60 seconds to prepareExperian · Software Engineer · Apr 2026
My first step was a quick interview that felt almost like a timed question-and-answer session. There were 4 to 5 questions, and I was at a "no person" stage, so it didn't feel like a traditional conversation. I had about 60 seconds to plan each answer and roughly two minutes to deliver it. The pacing stood out. The questions didn't leave much room to meander, so I had to organize my thoughts quic…
- Failed Onsite Coding on a No-Feedback Maze That Needed BFS Over Belief StatesGoogle · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
The final feedback was that my coding wasn't good enough. It was a BFS problem, and I didn't think of that at first. You're given a maze: # is a wall, . is an open path, E is the exit. The only commands are up / down / left / right, and each one moves you one cell. Key rules: If you hit a wall you stay where you are (that's not a failure, you just stay in place). Execution gives no feedback at al…
- First-Ever System Design Round, a Subscription System, and an OfferNetflix · Software Engineer · Other · Apr 2026Offer
This was my very first system design interview, and I had no real background in it at all. I had about a week to prepare. I began with an online system design course and read all of its articles. They explained what system design even is and gave me an outline I could stick to. After that I moved on to the course's practice problems, and those are what really changed things for me. I watched some…
- Five Onsite Rounds, Every One Circles Back to Multi-TenancySalesforce · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Sharing my interview experience with Salesforce. My impression of this company is very different from consumer-product companies: the problems themselves aren't going for difficulty, but almost every round eventually circles back to "what if this system is shared by a lot of customers." Multi-tenancy, permissions, and configurability ran through the whole interview. There was also a whole round d…
- Five Onsite Rounds, One a Surprise Clustering QuestionUber · Data Scientist · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026
Round 1: past project deep dive. Not much to say about this kind of subjective round. I feel like I explained it well, but that doesn't mean I won't still get rejected. Round 2, coding: we spent 25 minutes going over my resume. The coding question was: given an integer, find the next palindrome integer greater than it. I'd never seen this before. The question is pretty abstract — you can't even e…
- Five Relaxed Rounds Built Around OOP and API DesignAdobe · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
This one felt pretty comfortable to interview with — slow pace, none of that being-chased-the-whole-time feeling. Each round was an hour, and in some rounds close to half the time was just chatting. The problems were medium-to-easy, but they really like steering things toward object-oriented design and code design — the questions here are different from what other companies ask. A quick note: I'm…
- Five Rounds From a Take-Home to a Four-Person Panel OnsiteBobyard · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Five rounds total. Round 1 is about your resume and experience. They have a technical recruiter who asks about some tech details. They asked a few common coding questions: if you find the frontend is loading slowly, how do you fix it? If you find a prod bug, how do you handle it? Round 2 is a take-home project. They ask you to design the frontend, backend, and DB for a comment system, satisfying…
- Five Rounds Including AI Coding and a New Agentic System Design RoundMeta · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
The full loop has a new format now — five rounds, and I got the rejection letter a week later. Round one, behavioral (BQ). Went pretty well — the usual how-do-you-resolve-conflict stuff, plus some talk about impactful projects, especially AI projects. Round two, AI coding: a card game — find three cards that sum to 15. Split into three steps: find the bug, implement the algorithm, optimize the al…
- Five Rounds, SQL Live Coding to a Senior Director Case StudyWalmart Labs · Principal Data Analyst · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Offer
This write-up was drafted with ChatGPT's help based on the reflection notes I wrote after each round, so some of the phrasing may sound a bit AI-generated — I hope that's okay, the content matches what I want to convey. I've noticed there are a lot of DS interview write-ups here but not many DA ones, so hopefully this helps people looking for DA roles. I recently got an offer for a Walmart Princi…
- Four Difficult Online Assessment QuestionsByteDance · Software Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
There were four questions in total, and they were quite difficult. Question 1 Description Given an array of positive integers numbers, calculate how many of its elements have an even number of digits. Note: The solution did not need to be optimal, but a time complexity no worse than O(numbers.length^2) would fit within the execution time limit. Example For numbers = [12, 134, 111, 1111, 10], the…
- Four ML System Design Rounds, Rejected on CalibrationAirbnb · Machine Learning Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
Four rounds, overall leaning heavily into ML system / ranking / marketplace scenarios. Not especially rote-memorization heavy, but they really value business sense and decision making. Two weeks later I got a curt rejection. Round 1: ML Experience / Behavioral + Technical This round mainly revolved around past projects, with a lot of focus on tradeoffs and decision making. I talked about a projec…
- Four One-Hour Onsite Rounds in a Single DayValon · Backend Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026
The recruiter got back to me within a day, really fast. First round, coding — 3 levels, 2 of which were the bar to clear. You write a schemaless database (an in-memory SQL), but you're given each column's type and name. Some rows might be missing certain columns. The first level is figuring out what data structure to use, then basically being able to store and read. The second level does filter a…
- Four One-Hour Rounds in a Single Phone ScreenOpenAI · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026In progress
Sharing my recent OpenAI Research phone screen. Round 1: general coding, 1hr Debug a distributed system. They gave me a buggy job scheduler written in Python — I had to check for data races, deadlocks, lock contention, and whether the rate limiter was implemented correctly. Partway through I had to write my own test cases to confirm the scheduler actually worked, then calculate how long the sched…
- Four Onsite Rounds From Ride-Hailing System Design to a Pub/Sub OOD QuestionAmazon · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Phone Screen Coding: Merge products by category. Given a bunch of tuples representing two products being in the same category, with transitivity, find how many categories there are in the end and the size of each group. Classic Union-Find — I solved it with BFS instead and it also passed. Onsite (4 rounds) System Design: Design a ride-hailing app. The core focus was on high-frequency GPS writes f…
- Four Onsite Rounds on the Ads Team, Then Ghosted During a FreezeNetflix · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026No response
Posting to share my interview experience with a different team on the Ads side, hoping it brings me some luck. It's been two weeks since I finished interviewing and I've been ghosted — no message at all from HR, so it's probably just gone into a black hole. First, I asked if I could interview for Staff, but HR firmly said no, telling me that an outside L6 is an L5 here, and that I'd have a chance…
- Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected on System DesignWhoop · iOS Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
I recently interviewed for a Senior iOS position at WHOOP (had a referral). Got rejected on the last round of the onsite, System Design. Didn't make it. My overall impression of this company's interview process was really, really good. The company also supports H1B and green card, so I hope anyone who needs that applies quickly. First, my impressions of WHOOP: Very efficient — from the initial co…
- Four Rounds on the Bing Team, No OfferMicrosoft · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
I applied to several MAI positions on the site, and then a Bing team doing image search got back to me and said they wanted to schedule an interview. First, let me complain about the HR — from the email address, it's clearly outsourced, and they never reply. For example, I asked what kind of interview this was, what it would cover, how many rounds — no idea at all. They'd only show up two or thre…
- Four Rounds, Best Vibe I Had All YearMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Four rounds, overall a really relaxed vibe. Posting my Microsoft interview experience to give back to the forum. Bottom line up front: this was the most comfortable-feeling interview I had all year. The interviewers were pretty much all friendly, nobody tried to trip me up on purpose, and when I got stuck they'd proactively throw me a rope. The questions were medium difficulty, but they cared a l…
- Four Technical Problems, Told Not a MatchOpenAI · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
Question 1: 1NN This one's got a lot of write-ups already on the forum, so I won't go into detail here. Question 2: Infectious disease The first three parts were exactly the same as what's already on the forum. The fourth part: at any given moment, for a plant that isn't dead yet, if it has >=K infected neighbors, it enters a dead countdown (dies after D days); if it has >=T but
- Four-Month Loop, Hard OA, Senior OfferMicrosoft · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Offer
I first tried to break into big tech back in 2022. I had no idea how hiring worked there and had never even heard of LeetCode, so it went about as badly as you'd expect. After two Google attempts and one at Amazon, I finally have a Senior offer from Microsoft, and honestly it feels great. The 2022 tries (Google and Amazon) came before I knew anything. It was only in 2024 that I stopped, wrote a s…
- Four-Round Onsite, Rejected for Lacking Depth in ML System DesignShopify · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
The phone screen was pair programming, and you were allowed to use AI (they recommended using the Cursor IDE). It was a question I'd seen mentioned in other interview report threads — a shorten URL problem, similar to a LeetCode-style question. The interviewer added some follow-ups. Since AI was allowed, it wasn't too hard overall — communication mattered more, so understanding what the interview…
- Fraud Detection Coding and a Payment System Design RoundAffirm · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026
Four rounds total: one hour of coding + half an hour of behavioral questions + one hour of system design + half an hour of behavioral questions. The two behavioral rounds were just the standard questions. Coding round (the prompt was long, but not hard): Part 1: Live Fraud Detector (Debug Existing Function) Description One of Affirm's competitive edges is our ability to do credit underwriting and…
- Full Onsite Loop, Rejected at the HM RoundAnthropic · Software Engineer · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
It's a bit of a shame — I ended up getting rejected at the HM round. I think I went through a relatively new process: complete the full interview loop first, then do team match afterward. Phone Screen The question was File Deduplication. The whole conversation went smoothly and I didn't feel like there were any obvious issues. About an hour after the interview ended, I got notified that a Virtual…
- Grammarly Software Engineer: technical screen, CS fundamentals, backend, and project walkthroughGrammarly · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026
The process was structured and moved at a steady pace. Before my application was submitted, I completed an initial technical screen. Once the application moved forward, I had a recruiter screening. After that, I met with an interviewer for a computer science fundamentals assessment that lasted about an hour. I then had a backend engineering round that lasted another hour. The final part of that p…
- Grammarly Solutions Engineer interview with a presentation and live demoGrammarly · Solutions Engineer · Other · Apr 2026
I went through an organized hiring process that lasted several rounds and felt professional from start to finish. Communication stayed consistent. The recruiter and hiring team set expectations early, followed up on timelines and next steps, and kept me informed after each stage. Each conversation had a clear purpose. There were about five to six rounds overall, and the team explained what they w…
- Gusto Software Engineer coding round: hard LeetCode problem and sponsorship constraintGusto · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
I started with the recruiter and first stage, then moved on to a coding round. The problem felt closer to the hard end of LeetCode than to an easy exercise. I first solved it with a brute-force approach, and after I showed that I understood the core logic, the interviewer pushed me toward an optimal method. I reached an efficient solution and passed the relevant test coverage, so I left feeling t…
- Gusto Software Engineer interview with repeated scheduling and communication issuesGusto · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
My biggest problem wasn't the technical difficulty. It was the process itself, especially how scheduling and communication kept falling apart. I had several recruiter interactions go sideways: calls where nobody joined, last-minute reschedules where I was stood up again, and follow-ups that never produced a clear answer. At one point, I even received a generic rejection email without any meaningf…
