Interview Experiences

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

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33 stories

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DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Rejected After a Dasher Pay Coding Screen With No Starter Code

I got a question that's pretty common on the forum, a combination of a Bootstrap-style problem and DoorDash Pay. The interviewer didn't give me any starter code, just the description below. He said to assume I'm a downstream service and the data comes from upstream. The answer I wrote turned out to be correct, it's just that the data was test cases, not data mocked from an upstream interface. A f…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Rough Code Craft

Let me start with the technical screen: a fairly classic multi-source BFS problem — find the nearest source for every cell in a 2D grid. Medium difficulty, leaning toward the basic side. Next is the onsite, four rounds in total. Round 1 was system design. The first 15 minutes were spent talking about a recent project of yours, then it moved into the design question. The task was to design an app…

Onsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Referral, Fast Loop, and a Painfully Slow Immigration Law Firm

Backfilling my full February DoorDash interview. It was a friend's referral. The process moved really fast, probably because my previous team and this team were a very close match in terms of business. The guidance said the coding round would be "coding with AI", but in the actual interview there was no AI assistance and no AI round, and the interviewers said they had never heard that AI was allo…

OfferOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Full Onsite Loop, Then Grilled About Using AI More

DoorDash's full loop. I felt like their question bank isn't very big — pretty much everything is covered by write-ups here already. Specifically, the phone screen with the interviewer: dasher_pay. Same problem that's already been posted here, so pay attention to handling the input datetime. I used a few states to control the order's status. I forgot the follow-up, but again, the situations posted…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Two-Day Virtual Onsite After the DashMart Phone Screen

Vendor recruiter call After the referral, I got an email scheduling the vendor recruiter call and the phone screen separately. This round was just going over my resume and checking whether there was overlap with the target team. The whole thing was 10+ minutes, and the questions felt pretty targeted. Phone screen A senior manager, and I got the DashMart problem. I hadn't looked at any write-ups b…

Onsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, Same Image Carousel Coding Problem

The onsite question had already been posted before — it's the same old image carousel problem. Four rounds onsite: Coding, 75 min: still the same old question — continuing to build comment and upvote features on top of the carousel. HM behavioral, 45 min: asked some standard behavioral questions, I talked about a project conflict / mistake, and they asked one that doesn't come up often — how do y…

Onsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, HM Chat Was the Roughest

System Design: Three-day donations. Specifically, you build a donation entry point for users, where the user submits their personal info plus how much money they want to donate to different organizations, and the problem gives you the assumption that you're only responsible for sending the money to the company's account. During the discussion the interviewer strongly suggested making it async, bu…

Onsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Loop Went Well, Then Rejected Over a Seniority Mismatch

LinkedIn HR reached out and said my background was a good fit; after an HR call, I moved into the interview process. The Phone Screen was an Easy coding question plus a follow-up — string matching. After passing the Phone Screen, I had a 30-minute informal chat with the Hiring Manager, mostly about the team's work and my own experience. After that, HR reached out to schedule the Loop Interview. T…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected Three Days Later

The phone screen was two months ago. The question then was [LeetCode] Koko Eating Bananas. I dragged it out for two months before I finally did the onsite. Four rounds. Round 1 was system design. The question was a three-day donation system. This round was 75 minutes long, but the interviewer and I ended up deep-diving into my project until the 45-minute mark before he even got into the design pa…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

A Two-Day Virtual Onsite With Four Rounds

Outsourced recruiter call After the referral went through, I got emails to schedule both the recruiter call and the phone screen. This round was just going over my resume and checking whether there was overlap with the target team — the whole thing was 10+ minutes, but the questions were pretty targeted. Phone screen A senior manager. The problem was DashMart-style — I hadn't looked at any interv…

Onsite0
DoorDashSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2025

Full Loop in a Week, Rejected Over a Level Mismatch

A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn saying my background was a good fit, and after an HR call I moved into the interview process. The Phone Screen was an Easy coding question with a follow-up — string matching. After passing the Phone Screen, I had a 30-minute informal chat with the Hiring Manager, mostly about the team's business and my own work experience. After that, HR reached out to schedule…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2025

Four-Round Virtual Onsite With an Incident Simulation

Virtual Onsite, four rounds total. First round simulated handling an Incident. Second round System Design, third round Coding, fourth round HM (Hiring Manager). Incident Assume we own a payment integration service. Internally, various services call us to make payments, and downstream from us is a financial institute. The current incident shows our service is abnormal, with high CPU and memory usa…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

OA, System Design, Debug, and Craft Rounds

OA: Not LeetCode. You're given an actual scenario and you live-code a Service class on HackerRank right there — the logic is fairly simple, basically a bunch of if-else checks just to see whether your logic is clear, not really algorithm-based at all. But there were three parts. My advice: once you've nailed down the requirements, write fast, otherwise you definitely won't have time left to write…

Onsite0

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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