Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

4437 stories

Likes earn the author +10 XP for the first 3 likes each day

DoorDashSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Four-Round VO, Menu Review Design Stuck in Schema Details Until Minute 45, Rejected

The phone screen was coding plus a project deep dive. The coding was that Dasher Pay question. The interviewer was really nice: right after I finished writing the code, they just told me not to worry, they were passing me. For the project deep dive, the interviewer listened really carefully and asked a lot of questions. The VO was four rounds. Round 1 was AI coding. I think they have two coding q…

RejectedOnsite0
InstacartSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Grocery Pricing Coding, Inventory System Design, and a 20-Minute Behavioral

Two coding rounds, one system design round, and one behavioral round. Coding question 1 Given input strings in the format SKUid|SKUNAME|QUANTITY|Price, output the total quantity and the total price in dollars. The price in the input is in cents. Watch out for bad input. Besides the input above, there is also a discount input, in the formats SKUid|axf|20 and SKUid|bxf|5|2. The first format is a 20…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Resilience, Payments, and Concurrent Dispatch

The author describes an unsuccessful DoorDash interview process beginning with a coding screen about coordinating calls to downstream services. Follow-up discussion addressed failure handling, retries, and when requests should be allowed through or blocked during faults. The final interviews included a donation-service design covering payment processing, failures, lost connections, and duplicate…

RejectedOnsite0
WayfairApplied Scientist
Sep 2026

Product Judgment and a Changed Role

The author describes a Wayfair machine-learning scientist interview beginning with an advertising-bidding case. Virtual-onsite exercises covered homepage module ranking, recommendations sent after a purchase, an AI-assisted bandit simulation, and behavioral questions. The coding session permitted AI tools and web searches with screen sharing, but follow-ups required explanations of bandit strateg…

RejectedOnsite0
IndeedMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Indexing and Insertion in an Unrolled List

The author describes a tricky coding exercise from an Indeed virtual onsite involving a linked structure whose nodes each hold an array, an occupancy count, and a next-node reference. The first task was to retrieve an element using its position across the entire structure. The report discusses locating the relevant node and relates lookup cost to the number of nodes traversed. The second task add…

Onsite0
MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

A Screen and Four Hiring-Event Rounds

The report describes a senior software engineering interview for Microsoft’s Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud organization. A technical screen in late August preceded a four-round hiring event in mid-September. The screen combined a three-number sum problem with a question about resolving disagreement. The first event round examined a thread-safe executor that preserves task orde…

Onsite0
AirwallexSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Real-Time Robot-Chase System Design, Then a Rejection with No Feedback

It was a direct two-round company screen — coding plus system design — and if you pass, the next step is the hiring manager round. The interviewer was based in China, so we could only schedule evening slots. The team is a new one in Seattle building a productivity tool. System Design — a real-time robot-chase mini-game The problem: the player moves around on a 500×500 terrain grid, and different-…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
CitadelSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

A Deep Dive on the Classic Orderbook Problem

This was my second round for the Citadel SWE intern process. The technical part was the classic orderbook problem. The question was the classic orderbook problem. Problem description: Design and implement an order book data structure that maintains order records containing the exchange name, price, quantity, and side (bid or ask). It needs to support three core APIs: add(exchange, price, quantity…

Technical Screen1
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

An AI-Coding Onsite Round, Rejected After System Design

Screen interview: Code Craft: Dasher Pay. Didn't feel too hard — just make sure to talk through your approach with the interviewer before you start coding. It's a high-frequency question from the forum. Onsite Round 1: Debugging: Round Robin Load Balancer. Also a forum question. Onsite Round 2: AI Coding. They had me set up a microservice locally on my own machine, specifically to handle abnormal…

RejectedOnsite0
Bank of AmericaData Scientist
Sep 2026

Hong Kong GQS Summer 2027

Describe a key accomplishment that best illustrates your personal initiative and willingness to push beyond what is required. Discuss a recent trend in the financial markets. Describe a time you solved a complex problem that required a lot of careful analysis on your part. Describe a time when you developed a strong relationship with a teammate or client. Coding 1 — Beautiful Strings: calculate t…

Technical Screen3
Capital OneSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Four Power Day Rounds and a Virtual Credit Card Case

I did the four-round Senior Lead AI Engineer Power Day in late September. It felt all right overall. I guess poor performance on the VNC case was why I didn't pass. Round 1 — AI Engineering / System Design Design an Enterprise Agent Platform The interviewer asked a series of AI / agent / platform / system-design questions that were within the scope of my preparation. Round 2 — Technical Case: Vir…

RejectedOnsite0
ZipHQSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI-Assisted Onsite Coding on an Expense Reimbursement Codebase

It was roughly three small problems. They gave us a codebase, but it had so many files that there was no way to read through all of it, so basically you have the AI read and write everything. It was a simple system for managing company expense reimbursements, with features like monthly expense and budget reports. The first problem was that the monthly report data was wrong, for example someone fi…

Onsite0
AmperitySoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Long Loop, Good Rounds, Then Silence

This company's interview process is seriously long and miserable. The HR keeps calling you without any heads-up, which feels like harassment. After the interviews they disappear for no reason, even though every round went well. My guess is that they do a back-channel background check behind your back. One of the interviewers is close with a PE in my org, so they probably went and asked him. Our P…

RejectedOnsite0
General MotorsSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Open-Ended System Design That Ran Fifteen Minutes Over

The interview was scheduled for 45 minutes. The interviewer gave me a question that was roughly: there is an application that has to call three to five dependency services, and how do you guarantee a specific target for a specific service, for example access latency under 10 seconds and availability above 99%. It didn't feel like a normal design round. It felt like a very open-ended discussion ab…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment with a Django Debug Round

40 min Coding. It was pretty hard, the approach was greedy + bit manipulation. Feels like Amazon doesn't want to hire anyone, lol 60 min Debug. This one is tricky, so let me roughly go over my approach: The second part is an existing Django project, and you have to debug it based on the failing tests. You are not asked to write Django from scratch. The debug order I'd recommend is: Test → URL → V…

Online Assessment1
MixpanelData Scientist
Sep 2026

Pandas Tasks and Open-Ended Retention Prediction

Following up on my previous SQL post: This was the Python screen in the same Mixpanel DS phone-interview round, about 45 minutes. There were four questions: two hands-on pandas tasks and two open-ended questions. Aggregate the users and events dataframes separately. Merge the two dataframes and check for duplicates. An easy one. Open-ended: Which features might predict retention? Explore the data…

In progressTechnical Screen0
GoogleEngineering Analyst
Sep 2026

Four Team Matches and a Verbal Offer After a Long Loop

A friend started referring me around September 2025. I had a recruiter screen in October, but the HM decided not to interview me. A team I applied to in February this year offered me an interview. The rough timeline: 3/9/2026 Recruiter reached out. 4/2/2026 RRK case, interviewed by a team member. 4/9/2026 Passed. 4/27/2026 RRK case + SQL, interviewed by a team member. 5/11/2026 Passed. 5/22/2026…

OfferOnsite0
AmazonBusiness Intelligence Engineer
Sep 2026

SQL Interrupted and a Shortened Phone Screen

I'd interviewed for Amazon BIE twice before. This was my third time, and the content was different every time. There aren't many related questions shared, so I'm contributing my experience to give everyone a sense of the difficulty. SQL: Write a query to find departments where more than 50% of employees exceeded their quarterly targets, but the department's overall sales growth is below the compa…

Technical Screen0
UiPathMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

LLM Agent Q&A, a LeetCode 837 Variant, and a Coding Reject

Role and interview process The role is an MLE position related to Agents. A recruiter reached out to me, and there were three rounds of interviews in total. Round 1: Recruiter call (30 minutes) We talked about my background, my current job search status, what direction I want to go in, and my timeline. The recruiter was very friendly and gave a detailed introduction to the company, but said the s…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ShopifyMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

AI-Encouraged Pair Programming on an Auto-Refund System, Failed the Next Day

I got the interview through a referral. The recruiter emphasized that it's pair programming and that using AI is very much encouraged. It's 75 minutes, and at the start the interviewer shares a repo with the problem statement and the actual questions in it. The problem was to write an auto refund system based on the requirements. It's not LeetCode style, more like a mix of mini system design + co…

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