Waymo Site Reliability Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected After a Rough, Disrespectful Technical Screen

Waymo·Site Reliability Engineer·Feb 2026
Technical ScreenRejectedmedium

I got rejected. This interview was for an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) role.

The question was roughly this: there's a number line from 0 to 50. Points keep landing on the line, and each point contaminates the region 0.5 to its left and 0.5 to its right of where it lands — i.e., an interval of length 1. Once part of the line is contaminated, it stays contaminated forever. Points can land anywhere, and the contaminated regions from different points can overlap. Design a function that takes a landing point (a double) as input each time it's called, and returns a boolean indicating whether the entire number line has been fully contaminated.

It took me a while to understand the problem. I had a rough idea of the approach, but I didn't finish writing the code.

The interview experience was really bad. The interviewer was extremely condescending, acted like he couldn't be bothered, and treated me like I wasn't even a person — like I owed him something. He showed up late without apologizing, didn't even say "how are you," and kept an impatient tone the whole time.

There was also a shadow interviewer sitting in.

Before the interview, I'd messaged the recruiter to ask what would be covered, but never got a reply — only the coordinator responded, and only about scheduling.

I don't know if this was just bad luck on my part, a company/team culture issue, or a discrimination issue. I hope nobody else runs into this.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Waymo
Role
Site Reliability Engineer
Rounds
Technical Screen
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Feb 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

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