Interview Experiences

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

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16 stories

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Hudson River TradingSite Reliability Engineer
Aug 2026

Rejected After Answering Every Question

Role: Site Reliability Engineer I had found a really useful interview report on the forum before mine, and the overlap with what I actually got asked was pretty high. This is also my own area of work, so going into the interview I felt like I had a 100% chance of passing, but I still failed. I'm not really sure why. Let me write up roughly what was asked — honestly you can just ask AI what kinds…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Watcher-and-Players Puzzle in the Technical Screen

This is the problem the interviewer described to me verbally during the technical screen, done in a coderpad environment. They also gave an example along with it. There is a game with multiple players. The road starts at position 0 and ends at position L. Each player has a starting position, and players can only move to the right, one unit per second. There is a watcher, starting at position W, i…

Technical Screen0
Hudson River TradingSoftware EngineerIntern
Jul 2026

A LeetCode-Easy Tree Path Question With No C++ Trivia

Fresh C++ SWE (Intern) first-round interview report Last week I had my first round for the C++ SWE (intern) position, a 1-hour Zoom coding interview. We spent a few minutes at the start briefly chatting about background, then moved into the problem. The question: given a binary tree where each node has an integer value, and a target, determine whether there's a path from root to leaf where the su…

In progressTechnical Screen0
Hudson River TradingSoftware EngineerIntern
Jul 2026

Two Phone Screens, from Deque O(1) Indexing to Stream Buffering

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Technical ScreenPremium0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Four OA Questions, C++ Required

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Online AssessmentPremium0
Hudson River TradingAlgo Engineer
Jul 2026

Rejected After Two Phone Screens

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
Hudson River TradingSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jul 2026

Online Assessment: Text Segmentation and Suffix-Pair Problems

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Online AssessmentPremium0
Hudson River TradingAlgorithm Development InternIntern
Jul 2026

A Probability Round on Mean vs. Median Estimators

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Technical ScreenPremium0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Hudson River Trading Software Engineer interview on OS and C++

The process was low-level from the start. After an initial online assessment or coding step, I entered live rounds that demanded deep knowledge rather than surface familiarity. I was asked how things work under the hood, down to memory and kernel operation, with an emphasis on the kind of understanding that gives a developer full control. One screen focused on OS topics at an implementation level…

Online Assessment0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Hudson River Trading Software Engineer interview

After a recruiter screen, I entered a long technical process centered on a take-home. The lack of feedback was difficult. I spent hours trying to meet the expected behavior without useful checkpoints. The RTL and verification assignment was ambiguous. I adapted my scoreboard to match the buggy RTL behavior, even though I thought a model should stay more abstract and respond only to the specified…

Take-home Project0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

An Hour of Pure C++ Systems Questions, No Algorithms

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Technical ScreenXP0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

A C++ Fundamentals Gauntlet That Ended 10 Minutes Early

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In progressTechnical ScreenPremium0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Two Verbal Technical Screens, No Test Cases

Both rounds were the interviewer dictating the problem out loud, so I had to take notes — miss one parameter and you're in trouble. Round 1: a one-dimensional array, N players walking to the right. A watcher starts at an initial position and watches the players. A player being watched can't move. The watcher switches direction according to a given list of timestamps. Given a termination time T, f…

Technical Screen0
Hudson River TradingQuant Researcher
Apr 2026

A 45-Minute CodeSignal C++ OA

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In progressOnline AssessmentXP0
Hudson River TradingAlgorithm DeveloperIntern
Mar 2026

Rejected After the Morning Onsite Rounds

I went to the onsite around October or November last year — sharing my experience getting rejected. I'm a US undergrad. I went through one coding OA and two math online interviews before getting to the onsite. The math rounds covered some probability and combinatorics questions — you need a solid grasp of the Central Limit Theorem and basic probability. The onsite has four rounds: programming, da…

RejectedOnsite0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

an OA with almost no test cases given

Just finished the SWE OA, same setup as the reports people have posted in past years. Overall it wasn't that hard — compared to some other trading companies it wasn't especially hard, but the OA email did say you need to write your own test cases, and that turned out to be true. They give very, very few test cases, and there are a lot of edge cases you have to figure out and test yourself. On one…

Online Assessment0

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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