Interview Experiences

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

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4437 stories

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AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Auto-Sent CodeSignal OA With a Four-Level Task Management System

I mass-applied, and got the OA invite right away. It was probably sent automatically by the system. Standard CodeSignal Industry Coding Assessment. You have to share your screen the entire time and keep your mic on so it picks up audio. The problem I got was a task management system. Level 1: The task management system should support adding, updating and retrieving tasks. Level 2: The task manage…

Online Assessment0
CrestaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen Building a Least-Load Job Dispatcher

Write a Job Dispatcher-Executor system. You are tasked with implementing a simple job dispatcher that distributes incoming jobs to a pool of executors (i.e., workers). Each job is represented as an integer (its ID), and executors are dynamically added and removed during runtime. You must define two classes: Executor – Represents a worker that can accept jobs. LoadBalancer – Maintains a list of ex…

Technical Screen0
VantaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Rough Technical Round Got the Next Day Cancelled

All of this had come up before. Coding: Implement a command line tool, uniq, with global uniqueness. Follow-up: what if the memory can't hold the entire hash table? SD: Metrics for most viewed URLs / subscription conversion rate of their web app. I didn't do well on the technical round, and the interview scheduled for the next day was cancelled outright. Feedback from the recruiter: Overall the t…

RejectedOnsite0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Five-Round IC2 Loop With an AI/Coding Round

Elimination Round Maximum Depth of Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal Round 1 – DSA Max Points on a Line / Max Collinear Points Minimum Length Substring Round 2 – AI + Coding LRU Cache with Counters Given different workloads, predict and calculate the cache's hit/miss ratio. This round required combining coding with reasoning about AI/system behavior. Round 3 – Hiring Manager Behavioral int…

Onsite0
NetflixMachine Learning EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

90-Minute OA With 4 MC and 2 Coding Questions

I just finished the Netflix MLE Intern OA. It was timed at 90 minutes, with 6 questions total: 4 multiple choice and 2 coding. Below are the topics I remember. I don't fully remember the exact wording or details anymore, but I hope this helps others preparing for the same OA. The multiple choice questions were fairly basic overall. The topics I can recall: Bayes' formula; simple calculations invo…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Two-Part Deployment Window Scheduler OA I Couldn't Finish

On 9/14 I applied to a mid-level role through a referral and got the OA right away. Honestly it was long and a total slog. Even using Claude I couldn't get it done. Problem background: Stripe needs a scheduler to manage service deployment times. Time is represented as minute_of_week, in the range [0, 10079] (a week has 10080 minutes in total). Input: part: "part1" or "part2" inputCsv: an array of…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
Citadel SecuritiesSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Lock-Free Producer-Consumer, Currency Arbitrage, and an Order Book

Implement a threaded producer-consumer, optimize from a mutex and then a spin lock. A list of currency conversions: determine if an arbitrage opportunity exists. Find the sequence of conversions to make money. Implement an order book data structure: maintain the order of incoming ask/bid/qty price, aggregate. Cancel an order without impacting other orders. Implement a smart queue: maintain the or…

Onsite0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Passing a Difficult Remote Interview Process

An Oracle IC3 applicant describes four remote interviews scheduled across a Thursday morning. Two sessions were coding interviews, alongside behavioral and design discussions. During the first coding session, the interviewer could not access the shared coding platform, so the applicant shared their screen. The author reports unclear retry requirements, additional constraints introduced after impl…

Onsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Explaining an Expense Rules Engine Before Using AI

The author reports passing Rippling’s first AI-assisted interview, which used an expense-policy evaluation exercise. Their approach began with discussing requirements and edge cases, then outlining classes and basic functions while explaining design decisions. This initial work took more than 20 minutes. Only afterward did the author ask AI to complete implementation details within that structure…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Bug-Hunt, AI-Pairing, and Map-Drawing Rounds, No System Design

I've already forgotten what the phone screen was, but it wasn't hard. The onsite loop was really different from other companies — felt different from what I'd seen and from other people's experiences too. Round 1 was a bug-hunting round, roughly three problems. Make sure you set up your IDE and install the plugins ahead of time — the details are in the email. (I wasn't careful and didn't read the…

RejectedOnsite0
AgodaData EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Reschedule Red Flag, Then Five Questions in Under 20 Minutes

I applied cold just to see what would happen, and got an OA the very next day (I think it was one SQL question and one Java question, don't quite remember). The phone interview was originally scheduled for last week evening to match their daytime hours, but when it came time, the interviewer's HackerRank was broken and wouldn't open. It got rescheduled last-minute to this week, which felt like a…

Technical Screen0
AmazonApplied Scientist
Sep 2026

Phone Screen Covers Music Recommendation CTR System Design

Phone screen Describe yourself What's your PhD topic What's your contribution Describe a time when you deliver under tight timeline ML Given a music recommendation, how would you design a system to convert to CTR rate? How do you embed the song? How do you deal with certain features? How do you deal with extremely sparse feature? Results aren't out yet, will update as I know more. Describe an ML…

In progressTechnical Screen0
RipplingBackend EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

An Onsite Where the Coding Round Expected You to Use AI

Interviewed for a Senior backend role in July. Round 1 — Coding (60 min), AI use explicitly allowed The interviewer (Data Cloud team) opened by saying directly: "The environment has an AI assistant set up, use it the way you normally would at work, just don't let it make every decision for you." Problem: task scheduler. You're given a batch of tasks (description / due date / priority / completed…

RejectedOnsite0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two Coding Rounds, a Manager BQ Chat, and a System Design Round

Two rounds of coding, and both were problems that had already been posted elsewhere before. The first one: the input is a transaction record and a set of discounts, and the discounts come in two types — one is a straight percentage off, the other is buy x get y free. The result you need to return is the best (lowest) price. There were 3 parts total, and I only got through the second part before t…

RejectedOnsite0
FireworksMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

AI-Assisted Coding

They asked me to create a referral system that recommends a list of other users for any given user, using the network of all users. The network consists of nodes, and two users are friends if their nodes are connected by an edge. Don't recommend current friends. Base recommendations on mutual friends: A and B are both connected to the same node, but A and B are not directly connected. Second, giv…

Onsite6
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

An OA on Budgeted Item Purchases

Input: prices[]: An array of length n, where prices[i] is the price of item i. queries[]: A two-dimensional array whose elements are [start_i, budget_i]. Each query means that only items with indices greater than or equal to start_i may be purchased, with a total budget of budget_i. Rules: Each item may be purchased at most once. The order or positions of the items do not matter; they do not have…

Online Assessment4
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One Virtual Onsite Round with BQ Drill-downs and a Checkout Price Engine OOD

Three BQ questions: Q1: Can you tell me about a time when you pushed back against a decision that negatively impacted your team? What was the issue? How did it turn out? Q2: Can you tell me about a time when a system was failing intermittently, and the very obvious metrics were all looking good? How did you find the root cause, and how long did it take? Q3: Can you tell me about a problem you had…

Onsite0
ByteDanceSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Three Rounds and an HR Call, Then Silence

I interviewed with TT USDS: three rounds, then an HR call, and then I never heard anything back. I don't know whether I got rejected. Round 1: two coding questions, LeetCode 3 and LeetCode 210. Round 2: a variant of LeetCode 207. I forgot how it was changed. For the rest of the time they kept asking me tech questions about monitoring, tracing, and telemetry. Round 3: system design. Design a payme…

No responseOnsite0
SquarepointData Scientist
Sep 2026

First Round, Three Coding Questions with a Friendly DQA

The interviewer is a DQA who already works there. The conversation was relaxed overall, the interviewer was easygoing and happy to talk and give hints, and the whole thing felt more like chatting while solving problems. Climbing stairs: each step you can choose from xx ways of moving, and you need to count how many ways there are to reach step n. This maps to LeetCode 70, and DP is enough. There…

Technical Screen0
FivetranSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

dbt Labs Team, Stumped by a SQL Engine Disk-Write Question

Fivetran acquired dbt Labs, and this position is under dbt Labs. HR call, pretty standard, just collecting background - 30 min HM call, introduced how the team is set up, standard behavioral questions - 1 hour System design: design a simplified version of WhatsApp. I felt the interviewer's level was just so-so — he was still getting stuck on RDBMS vs NoSQL differences, that kind of old-school que…

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.

Share your experience to earn XP