Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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GoogleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Back-to-Back Phone Screens: Behavioral, Then an HTTP Router

After I finished the psychological test, they scheduled my phone interviews right away. It was two rounds back to back, 45 minutes each, and I don't know if that's normal. The first round was a behavioral round with a really nice interviewer. All the questions were the usual ones: what do you do if you disagree with a coworker, what do you do if you disagree with another team, what do you do if a…

Technical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Food Review System Design That Was All DB Schema, Then a Debug Round, Rejected

I was rejected a few weeks ago, so I'm posting this now. The phone screen was nothing special, the classic payment question, and the interviewer was very helpful. Onsite: Hiring manager round. Nothing much, it's basically just BQ, and they all came out about the same. System design, the classic food review. The interviewer barely discussed anything with me the whole time. Basically I was the one…

RejectedOnsite0
StripeSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2026

Passed the Tech Screen, Rejected After the VO (AI Coding, Integration, BugSquash)

Writing down my 2027 NG Stripe rejection (and, as a bonus, what I think is the most complete set of Stripe NG prep material you can find online). Timeline 2026.9.3 the role opened, I got a friend to refer me → 2026.9.4 got the OA → 2026.9.6 finished the OA, all test cases passed in half an hour → 2026.9.10 got an email from HR to schedule the Technical Screening → booked 9.16 for the Technical Sc…

RejectedOnsite1
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Game of Life Scaled to 1M x 1M in a Phone Screen

The interviewer first demoed Conway's Game of Life in the browser (I had never heard of it before), then pasted starter code into CoderPad: next_gen computes the next generation of the board. There is a helper _process_cell(old_board, new_board, row, col) that decides whether a cell lives or dies based on its neighbor count. The initial board is random with a probability p between 0 and 1, so the…

Technical Screen0
NetflixSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

Phone Screen on a Key-Value Store with TTL, Rejected

I recently interviewed for an IC5 role on the Netflix Ads team. The phone screen was the classic Key-Value Store with TTL. Personally I felt it went okay. I implemented the usual set of methods, and for TTL expiration I used a min heap keyed on timestamp. I explained my design thinking and the tradeoffs as I went, wrote test cases at the end, and the code ran correctly. I still got rejected. The…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Fault-Tolerant Queue Coding and Online Devbox Design Phone Screens

I interviewed last week. After work I prepared on and off for over a month, and I went through basically all the questions on the forum. The phone screen was two rounds, one coding and one design. The coding question was a fault tolerant queue. I had to implement enqueue, reserve, fail and a DLQ, and they gave unit tests that all had to pass. The first part went fairly smoothly and all the tests…

In progressTechnical Screen0
PinterestData Engineer
Oct 2026

Splitwise Question in the Tech Screen, Ran Out of Time on the Follow-up

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2026

Four-Part Split Tender Online Assessment

I converted the screenshot version into text, including some test cases, to help everyone prepare! Split Tender Many of Stripe's merchants rely on Stripe Terminal to accept in-person payments at the point of sale. In physical retail, it's common for a customer to cover a purchase with multiple payment methods. For example, they might cover a $100 purchase with a $40 gift card combined with a $60…

Online Assessment0
OdeSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Test-Driven Pair Programming Phone Screen

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…

Technical Screen1
RipplingSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

Phone Screen Where You Choose Whether to Use AI

This was the first technical interview after HR screen. The interviewer asked me do I want to use AI or not, and said if I picked AI I would get a harder question. I chose not to use AI and this was the question I needed to solve in 45 minutes: Design a delivery-driver payment system add_driver(driver_id, usd_hourly_rate) — register a driver with an hourly rate. record_delivery(driver_id, start_t…

Technical Screen1
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

System Design for a Real-Time Trivia Battle Royale Platform

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.…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three-Part Sliding Window Coding Round

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…

Onsite1
FireworksSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

AI-Allowed Phone Screen on Detecting Attacks in Logs

It was a 45-minute phone screen. The recruiter sent me the problem in advance and said I could use AI for coding. The problem was how to detect security attacks in a pile of text-format logs according to given rules. The interviewer had already given me the rules (for example, a source IP accessing more than 10 different destination IPs within 10 minutes). I asked whether I could use AI, and the…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MercorSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

No-Coding Technical Screen with Code-Reading Questions, Did Not Pass

I applied online. There is no recruiter screen - first call is a HM screen where they ask you basic questions. Next screen is a 30 minute technical screen with no coding. Mine had 4 questions - Tell me the worst sorting algorithm - (n!) and explain how you would calculate each permutation You visit two coffeeshops A and B and order 2 drinks from each. Each drink gets a quality score. What is the…

RejectedTechnical Screen1
VantaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Added Oct 2026

Vanta onsite

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…

RejectedOnsite1
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Oct 2026

A Huge YAML Merge Problem and a Knapsack That Wants Quickselect

The first-round interviewer was really nice, but the problem was super long. Reading and understanding the problem plus the examples can take maybe 20 minutes. Roughly, it is merging two trees (YAML files), where every node has merge rules, and there are a lot of rules. The approach is DFS plus rule matching. The second-round interviewer gave me a knapsack problem, but for this one DP or DFS with…

Technical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three Rounds of Graphs, System Design and Leadership Principles

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…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Phone Screen Failed on a Fault Tolerant Queue and a Typing Race Design

I had two phone screen rounds, one coding and one design. The coding round was a fault tolerant queue. I had to implement enqueue, reserve, fail, and a DLQ, and there were 7 unit tests that all had to pass. Part 2 added task dependencies. Each task comes with a cooldown after it gets preempted, and you have to use the preempt timestamp to work out yourself when the cooldown ends. Also, when a tas…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ByteDanceMachine Learning EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2026

Research Talk, Model Questions and a Fishing Pond Coding Problem

First was a self-introduction, then I introduced my research. He said I could share slides if that would make things clearer. I happened to be preparing my proposal recently, so I shared my slides, and it definitely felt better than just talking through it. He asked some questions based on my work, normal follow-ups. Interestingly, he also brought up jev and asked whether I follow it. Then on the…

Technical Screen0
AMDSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three Rounds from C++ and DevOps Basics to LRU Cache

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…

Onsite0

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 details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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