Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Poker System Design, OOD Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Two Hiring Manager Rounds

Apple·Software Engineer·Sep 2025
Onsitemedium

Coding 1
Design a poker card system, implementing two core methods: shuffle and order. The order method needs to return a sorted list of cards by suit and rank — for example starting with 3 of Clubs, 3 of Diamonds, 3 of Hearts, 3 of Spades, and so on up through Ace.

Coding 2
First a relatively simple LeetCode DFS (depth-first search) question, followed by an OOD (object-oriented design) segment where you had to modify an existing rock-paper-scissors system. The original system had three different bots playing against each other and output each bot's win count. Your task was to make the number of rounds configurable, and add a new feature to track the number of ties. The important thing was understanding the existing code — the changes themselves weren't hard.

System Design
This round wasn't the traditional "design a whole system from scratch." Instead they gave some hypothetical scenarios and questions — for example, a Yelp-like system, asking how you'd design the data model, how you'd scale read and write capacity, how you'd use a CDN or caching to optimize performance, and so on. It also touched on how you'd design a URL shortener. How do you scale writes, how do you scale reads.

Hiring Manager interview (two rounds)
It's been a few days so I've forgotten some of it.

  • How you deal with feedback
  • Whether you have any AI-related project experience
  • How you approach learning new technologies
  • What the biggest challenge was in a recent project, and why you're considering switching jobs

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

Practice the questions from this interview

Discussion

Sign in to join the discussion. The author is notified of every comment.

Loading comments…

Interview at a glance

Company
Apple
Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Onsite
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Sep 2025
Questions from this interview
5 questions

Real Apple interview experiences

First-hand reports from Apple candidates — the rounds, the questions they were asked, and how it went.

All 34 Apple interview experiences