Interview Experiences

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

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34 stories

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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
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
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
AppleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Software Engineer interview: onsite assignment and presentation

Recruiter outreach moved quickly into a multi-step process that felt smooth even though it was complex. I went through several rounds with different interviewers, each focused on how I would operate in the role rather than on curveballs. The HR touchpoints clearly explained what each stage would test. I had an onsite-style experience with an assignment and a presentation at the end, which made th…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Software Engineer interview: CMOS logic and architecture reasoning

After a recruiter chat, I moved through structured rounds that felt focused and practical. The first round asked me to explain core flow stages end to end, tying each stage's inputs to its purpose. The questions soon became more specific, including level shifting, isolation cells, and how CMOS logic works for an inverter. The virtual onsite was about how I approached an engineering problem, not j…

Technical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Apple Software Engineer interview with a full-day final round of eight conversations

The interview cycle was organized but intense. I had four rounds overall, and the final one was a full day with around eight separate interviews running back to back. There were a lot of technical and behavioral questions, and the main demand was sustained focus. Before that full-day round, I had conversations about my background and projects. They started with my CV, then moved into targeted tec…

0
AppleMachine Learning Engineer
Jul 2026

One Project, Grilled to the Bottom

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Technical ScreenPremium0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

Six Onsite Rounds That Felt Like Six Different Companies

Six rounds, written for people as confused as I was. One thing I only understood after the whole process: this company hires by team, so each team sets its own bar and writes its own questions — which means whatever interview experience you find here for this company might be less useful than you'd hope. Over my six rounds, the six interviewers were different enough in style that it felt like six…

Onsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

I Walked Out on a Rude HM Screen

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WithdrewTechnical ScreenXP0
AppleSoftware QA Engineer
Mar 2026

Accessories Team and a Final Coding Rejection

HR phone screen: Some questions about my immigration status. They pointed out that the job had to be onsite in San Diego, though the interviews could take place in Cupertino. The second round was with the hiring manager. We discussed my current work and projects, then my previous QA experience: benchmarking and regression, reducing the false-failure rate, optimizing HPC resource usage, and reduci…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleAccessories Software QA EngineerNew Grad
Mar 2026

A Reorganization Delay and Onsite Rejection

In the first interview, I talked with HR about the role being in San Diego and confirmed that the role would sponsor my OPT. In the second interview, I talked with the hiring manager about my previous QA projects. [I'd done a year as a QA intern and had basically done all the full-time work once already.] Then I was ghosted for three weeks. After that, they called me back and said a reorganizatio…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleResearch Scientist
Mar 2026

Setting a Retry Threshold to Save iPhone Battery

I recently interviewed for a Research Scientist role at Apple, on a team that works on battery power. Here's the question they asked. The team's core mission is optimizing iPhone battery life and power usage. They found that when users are on Apple Music, they often hit network fluctuations where the app can't get the audio data. At that point the system faces a choice: The disconnect could be a…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleMachine Learning Engineer
Mar 2026

A UNet Debugging Question I Wasn't Ready For

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP1
AppleHardware Sensor EngineerNew Grad
Feb 2026

Five Onsite Case Studies, Rejected

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RejectedOnsiteXP0

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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