Interview Experiences

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

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45 stories

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AppleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Java-Only CoderPad Screen With a Progressive Store-Hours Problem

I'm definitely done for after today's interview, no need to even think about it. I'm sharing my experience, and I'd also like everyone to help me critique it. The interviewer didn't introduce himself and there was no BQ. He just told me to open CoderPad and start writing a problem. The problem was progressive, and I could only use Java. It wasn't hard at all. There's a store, you're given an open…

Technical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Straight-to-Code Phone Screen, Multi-Family Unit Conversion Graph in Java

I had prepped for a resume deep dive or BQ, but the moment it started, without a word, we went straight into the problem. It's been a long time since I had such a pure interview. It was a variant of LC 3535 (unit conversion), which I'd also seen in an earlier interview report. The difference is that there's more than one family of unit conversions, e.g. temperature is one series and length is ano…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One Hiring Manager Round on Terraform Provisioning, Then a Rejection

The first round was a 55-minute interview. From my own digging before the interview, I figured out that the person interviewing me was the Hiring Manager. The first half was just chatting with them. Every Apple interview I've done so far has been like this. The last 20-some minutes were some high-level design questions. This team does management and maintenance of infra, and the question was very…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

Great Feedback Despite Fumbling C++ Trivia

I mass-applied online, and 3 days later a recruiter picked me up; the team I was interviewing with was a pretty good match. The first round went straight into a tech interview. I started with a self-introduction and a brief chat about my resume, no very technical questions there. Then it moved into coding. No algorithms - they used their own custom question, and I was allowed to use AI. Basically…

Technical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Resume Deep Dive, Then a Plant-Poisoning Grid Problem

I think the team was TV. It was supposed to be a hiring manager round with one interviewer, but a different interviewer joined instead. He said we would be writing code, but then he suddenly started a deep dive into my resume and we talked for 20 minutes. Then he moved on to the problem, which was either whatever "Jiujiusi" is or plant poisoning. 0 is healthy and 1 is poisoned. If a healthy cell…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen Rejection After a Bug-Free LRU

AES team. The role was posted by someone on the forum (I don't know whether they were the hiring manager), but I applied on my own, and the recruiter reached out very quickly. The phone screen was with one interviewer. For the first thirty minutes it was behavioral questions plus a project deep dive, and I got affirmed on all sorts of things. After that came LRU, bug free, and it ran with the rig…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleData Scientist
Sep 2026

Exploring Employee and Audit Tables with the Hiring Manager

It was a team focused more on internal work. The first round was a technical interview with the hiring manager, and we started solving problems with almost no self-introduction. I have to say Apple's questions were very detailed. It really felt like they were testing technical ability through the work you normally do. I needed to think aloud; they cared a lot about how I understood the data and e…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Virtual Onsite with Top-K URLs Design, HTML Parser and LRU Cache

System design: Top-K trending URLs Design a system that surfaces the top K most-visited URLs over a time window. Clarify first: the window (last hour vs. last 24h), how fresh results need to be, exact vs. approximate counts, and read vs. write volume. Ingestion: click or visit events go to a stream (Kafka), partitioned by URL hash. Counting: stream processors keep per-URL counts in tumbling or sl…

Onsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three Phone Rounds, Three Virtual Onsite Rounds, Rejected

This was my first time interviewing for an Apple SDE role, and it was for compute infra. Overall the experience was bad: three phone rounds, then three virtual onsite rounds. Apple hires by team, and every team has its own interview style. My team did phone interviews one round at a time, and you only got the next round if you passed the previous one. Round 1: OS and networking fundamentals plus…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Same-Day Rejection

The team is under iCloud and mainly works on time series and operations research optimization. The first round was a resume deep dive with the hiring manager. They asked how to decide which cloud storage tier to use for a user's files, such as AWS S3 versus AWS S3 Glacier, since different tiers have different costs. It was essentially a classification problem: predicting those files' access proba…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleAI/ML Full Stack Engineer
Aug 2026

Designing a 200TB Media Data Transfer Pipeline

Question Background The interviewer threw out a fairly open-ended system-design / data-engineering question: You have 200TB of media data (images/videos) that needs to be transferred to compute hosts / a compute cluster for processing (preprocessing, inference, training). How would you design this? There's no standard answer to this one. What it's actually testing is: can you pin down the scope o…

Other0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Phone Screens Then a Four-Round Onsite

Phone Screen 1: Coding — Implement Hit Counter Implement a Hit Counter that records the time of each request and can query how many hits happened in the last 5 minutes, i.e. within 300 seconds. Main interface: hit(timestamp) records a request getHits(timestamp) returns the number of requests in the past 300 seconds You can use a queue, or a circular buffer aggregated by second. The focus is on ho…

Onsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Phone Screens, Easy Coding Then a Distributed Cache Design

This was for ASE, on the storage infra team. Phone screen round 1: the HM, 45 mins. BQ Coding 1: string run-length decoding. For example, a5b3c -> aaaaabbbc Coding 2: count the nodes in a chain. Each node can only access the node to its left and the node to its right, and you have to count how many nodes there are in total. Both problems needed test cases. Summary: the coding questions were very…

Technical Screen0
AppleFull Stack Engineer
Jul 2026

React JS and Java Coding Rounds

React JS Coding Round In incognito mode, if you open a site like Amazon.com or Flipkart.com, what are some ways to optimize the page's load speed? Is JavaScript single-threaded or multi-threaded? What is the event loop? Does JS execute top to bottom, or the other way around? If you fetch 10M records via an API in JS and render them in a table in the UI, what problems show up in the UI? How would…

Technical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Remote K8s Role, Passed Two Screens Then Bumped for an Internal Transfer

Screening: I had to hand-write a consistent hashing ring from scratch; then K8s questions, like where do you start when a pod has a problem; and finding a bug in some Terraform. The result came back on the spot, and half an hour later the recruiter replied to schedule the phone screen. All I can say is, fast. Phone screen: they gave me skeleton code for a union find and I had to fill it in. Then…

No responseTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Software Engineer interview: design challenge decision

HR outreach quickly led to an hour-long hiring-manager conversation about my background, technical topics, and design. I did not feel especially strong in those answers, but I still advanced to a design challenge. The cycle ended after I submitted that work. I was rejected after the design challenge, without a long back-and-forth. What surprised me was how quickly the process moved from conversat…

RejectedOther0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Software Engineer interview: technical depth and uncomfortable tone

The overall cycle was technically heavy and thorough. I had multiple rounds with mostly professional, fair questions about heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics. I was expected to show understanding even when the questions became specific. Two rounds felt different. Those interviewers kept adding follow-ups until they found something I could not answer, and some questions required de…

Other0
AppleMachine Learning Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Machine Learning Engineer interview: smooth and rushed flows

My smoother interviews began with a technical phone screen, then a comfortable, practical DSA-style round. It included a regression-model critique and a subset-sum-style problem. I had recently worked through similar problems, so those patterns were already familiar. I then had a codebase-style evaluation around PDF evaluation logic. The structure felt familiar because I had previously reviewed t…

OfferTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Software Engineer interview: verification and timing closure

The process began with a short phone call where I was walked through the overall structure. The later rounds centered on my resume and projects, then moved straight into hardware verification and design. The technical range ran from basic material to SVA constraints, UVM, and handshake-style interactions. A later round was even more focused on code and timing logic. We covered DFT fundamentals, e…

Technical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Software Engineer interview: timing, circuits, and coding under pressure

The process was long and kept expanding. I had multiple roughly one-hour interviews, and the volume itself made it intense. Technical questions covered setup and hold timing, transistor and diode behavior, logic reasoning, and at least one coding round with medium LeetCode-style problems such as string compression and an LRU cache. The mix of coding and hardware-timing questions tested both reaso…

OfferTechnical Screen0

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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