Apple Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Food Rating System Phone Screen, Rejected After a Peek/Pop Bug

Apple·Software Engineer·Oct 2026
Technical ScreenSenior+Rejectedmedium

It was similar to LeetCode 2353, Design a Food Rating System. I had to write the class and the test cases myself.

There was not much back-and-forth overall. I started with a self-introduction, and then they asked what I'm looking for next.

I had just finished on 10.29, and a week later I was told "not moving forward."

Thinking it over afterwards: I think there was a small bug in my final code. Where I should have used peek I wrote pop, and I had worked out the time complexity as O(1) based on peek, but with pop it becomes O(log n). I ran out of time before my own test run could cover these issues. At least every bug that showed up during the interview got fixed. Maybe I should leave more time to make sure the test coverage is there.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Apple
Role
Software Engineer
Level
Senior+
Rounds
Technical Screen
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Oct 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

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