Interview Experiences

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

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7 stories

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LyftData Scientist
Reported Jul 2026

Lyft Data Scientist interview: probability to causal modeling

I began with a recruiter screen of about 30 minutes. It was structured: they checked the basic boxes and explained what would happen next. The process then moved through a general data-science screen on probability, A/B testing, and business sense, followed by four deeper technical rounds. Those covered coding and algorithms, optimization, causal modeling, and business acumen tied back to product…

HR Screen0
LyftSoftware Engineer
Reported Jun 2026

Lyft Software Engineer Interview Experience: A transactional recruiter screen

The recruiter screen set a rough tone immediately. I came in for a backend engineering role, but the conversation felt overly transactional, as though boxes were being checked instead of discussing the technical impact I had delivered. I shared concrete examples from past work, including architecture decisions, optimizations, and engineering scenarios. I expected the conversation to connect those…

HR Screen0
LyftSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Onsite Loop with a Paginated Fetch Design and a Job Scheduler

Onsite. They gave me a long chunk of existing code and asked me to implement a function based on it. Essentially there's a fetch(page) function that returns the items on that page along with the next page's nextPage. We needed to implement fetch_n as a method on another class, so that we could pull n elements continuously. Each call continues extracting from wherever the last call left off, so th…

Onsite0
LyftSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Onsite Went Fine, Hiring Manager Call Was Discouraging

First, the technical screen. It was a sliding window LeetCode hard, but honestly not that hard — it was just 76, Minimum Window Substring. Next came the onsite, three rounds total. The first round was coding. The first 15 minutes were spent talking about past projects, then 60 minutes on the problem, and the last 15 minutes was free-form chat. The problem: given a set of jobs, each with a start t…

Onsite0
LyftData Scientist
Jan 2026

Fast-Paced Case and Stats Phone Screen, No Offer

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
LyftData Scientist
Oct 2025

Surprised by the Low L4 Base Pay, Then a Four-Round Onsite

The HR video interview covered salary expectations (the L4 base salary was really low — I was shocked). After passing that round, I had a tech phone screen (pretty similar to what people share online — probability calculations, an open-ended supply-and-demand question). After that round they went straight to scheduling a 4-round onsite. HR was really nice and gave me a rough idea of what each rou…

Onsite0
LyftSoftware EngineerIntern
Oct 2025

Three Rounds, Rejected for No Headcount After Three Months

The OA had two parts. The first was responding to a PM's comments inside a doc, and the second was coding — more like they hand you a stripped-down existing project and have you edit the code according to review comments, not your typical LeetCode problem. VO1: one hour of coding, something like LRU. I basically finished within 30 minutes. The interviewer was really nice, and there weren't many f…

RejectedOnsite0

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.

Share your experience to earn XP