Interview Experiences

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

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13 stories

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RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three Back-to-Back Onsite Rounds, Rejected the Next Day

10/6: back-to-back 3 rounds. 1st: project deep dive. 2nd: system design, a job scheduler. 100,000 job definitions, 10,000 concurrent job runs, all cron jobs, no immediate run, at-least-once guarantee. I get the feeling the interviewers also prepare from stuff they find online. I followed a popular online breakdown of this problem and added a schedule entity, and the interviewer questioned why it…

RejectedOnsite0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Market Data API Design Round, Expecting a Rejection

Design the Robinhood Marketdata API GET /quotes/{symbol}/live: real-time quote, ~10M qps GET /quotes/{symbol}/historical?range=(1d,1m,1y): historical range, ~1M qps They gave me a data source, NASDAQ Last Sale: two independent, redundant long-lived TCP connections (Conn A/B); about 7,000 symbols; peak of ~100k trades/s on each connection; 6.5 trading hours per day. Message format: symbol (4-5 ASC…

In progressOnsite1
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Fractional-Share Inventory

The author describes a first-round Robinhood coding interview about handling customer trades when an exchange accepts only whole shares. The exercise tracked fractional inventory by symbol, covered purchases and sales, and included orders expressed either in shares or in money. Exchange transactions had to leave each inventory balance nonnegative and below one share after an order. The supplied f…

Technical Screen0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Load Factor, Reachability, and Explaining the Approach

The coding question was the classic load factor problem and was essentially the standard version. At the beginning, I asked whether I could assume that every node was reachable. The interviewer said yes, so I implemented the solution under that assumption. When I finished, it passed three of the four tests. I then started adding an explicit reachability check. My main advice from this interview i…

Technical Screen0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

SDE II Loop with a Job Scheduler Design

I want to share my Robinhood SDE II interview experience. Although I did not get an offer in the end, I learned a lot while preparing, and I hope this gives people interviewing later a useful reference. Technical Screening A frequently seen Referral Count problem, solved with DFS and memoization. Coding Fractional Stock Inventory, 45 minutes. My main implementation and all test cases passed. Ther…

RejectedOnsite0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Referral Graphs and a Job Scheduler

The applicant reports completing Robinhood’s three-hour onsite across three separate days. A referral-count coding problem went smoothly, but the project discussion was harder: the applicant struggled to explain the system’s complexity and scalability after the interviewer exhausted questions about business logic. The report advises preparing useful starting points for a deeper technical conversa…

RejectedOnsite0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Three Onsite Rounds, Rejected With No Feedback

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Two Months of Team-Match Limbo, Then a 'Role Moved to Toronto' Excuse

This has been an extremely long timeline, and even now I still don't know whether they want to reject me but can't bring themselves to say it, or whether they're just pretending it's still a team match. If any of you are at Robinhood, please help me figure this out. Thanks! Feb 11 — talked with the recruiter. Feb 19 — first technical round, they said I passed. Then another prep call with the recr…

RejectedOnsite0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

CoderPad Print Bug Derails a Topo Sort Phone Screen

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
RobinhoodSoftware EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Passed the Tech Rounds, Failed the EM Round, Redid Team Match

I interviewed for Senior Software Engineer on the Competitor Insights team. I passed the technical rounds, but failed the EM round because I lacked frontend experience. The recruiter agreed to let me redo team match, so I talked to the Experimentation team as well. Round 1: Hiring Manager We covered the usual collaboration and communication questions, and I was also asked a lot of questions about…

Onsite0
RobinhoodSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jan 2026

Three-Round Onsite, Rejected After Over-Engineering the Coding Round

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

System Design Round Ended Early, Rejected in 9 Minutes

A bit of background: I graduated in 2021 and did four years of C++ SDK dev, mixed in with about two years of building a Python test framework. My company started requiring three days a week back onsite, and the commute was wearing me out, so I started looking for something closer to home. Robinhood's infra work wasn't really a match for my background, but they gave me an interview anyway, and in…

RejectedOnsite0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

The Referral Chain Leaderboard Problem

Robinhood's referral program is pretty well known. The task is to build a dashboard to track the state of the referral program, specifically to understand how people refer others through a referral chain. Assume a person refers everyone below them in the chain. For example, A refers B, C, and D in a referral chain A -> B -> C -> D. Build a leaderboard showing the top 3 users with the most referre…

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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