Interview Experiences

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

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9 stories

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WaymoSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Cleared Every Round, Then Told They Wanted Someone More Senior

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
WaymoSoftware Engineer
May 2026

A Four-Round Onsite With Two System Design Problems

A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. Apparently the company's valuation went up 4x earlier this year, so they've been hiring a lot lately. The onsite was four rounds total. Round 1: System Design Design a Matchmaking Service: Join matchmaking queue Cancel matchmaking request Match two compatible players Notify both players when a match is found Handle disconnects and expired requests Round…

Onsite0
WaymoFrontend EngineerSenior+
May 2026

Rejected 30 Minutes After Pushing on the Process

I interviewed for a senior frontend engineer role, on the simulation team. Probably not much help to most people but in case someone needs it. Phone screen Part 1 — I don't remember the exact details, but it was related to n-ary tree recursion. Roughly, if a node's value contains a certain substring, you need to remove the entire subtree. Return the filtered tree. Part 2 was building a UI based o…

RejectedOnsite0
WaymoMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Mar 2026

Two ML Design Rounds and a Coding Question I Couldn't Finish

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
WaymoSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

A 45-Minute BFS Shortest-Path Screen With a Noisy Background

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Technical ScreenXP0
WaymoSite Reliability Engineer
Feb 2026

Rejected After a Rough, Disrespectful Technical Screen

I got rejected. This interview was for an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) role. The question was roughly this: there's a number line from 0 to 50. Points keep landing on the line, and each point contaminates the region 0.5 to its left and 0.5 to its right of where it lands — i.e., an interval of length 1. Once part of the line is contaminated, it stays contaminated forever. Points can land anywhe…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
WaymoMachine Learning Engineer
Jan 2026

Tripped Up by a Google-Style DSA Question

A recruiter reached out to me. Phone screen: DFS, pretty standard. I had the next four rounds on the same day: Round 1: ML fundamentals. Pure conversation, talked about my projects and experience, and he'd find things to ask about along the way. Felt pretty smooth, the guy listened carefully and didn't interrupt randomly, very respectful. Round 2: ML coding. Based on the prep materials they gave…

Onsite0
WaymoData Scientist
Jan 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Then Ghosted

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No responseOnsiteXP0
WaymoMachine Learning EngineerIntern
Dec 2025

K-Means++ Miss and a Trajectory Prediction Question

First round: We just chatted casually at the start — they asked about the project I'd worked on, how big the network was, how many parameters, how big the data was, that kind of thing. I couldn't really remember most of it. Then we moved on to coding k-means. I had to explain what k-means is first, and after I finished writing it, they asked me to write a better initialization method. They gave m…

RejectedTechnical Screen0

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