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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NinjatraderSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Log Parser and Anomaly Detector Coded Against Pytest in an IDE

An interview at NinjaTrader, a small brokerage. Server Log Analyzer and Anomaly Detector Problem environment: an IDE with server.log (sample logs), analyzer_stub.py (skeleton code), and test.py (pytest unit tests). You have to implement the functions below. Input data spec (JSON Schema): the input is multi-line text, and each line is a JSON string containing these 4 required fields: timestamp: a…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

10-Minute Resume Grill, Then First Missing Positive in O(1) Space

The interview started right on time and went straight into an intense 10-minute resume grill. The interviewer homed in on my recent backend work, specifically asking detailed questions about the Kafka streaming architecture and Redis caching implementations from my previous internship in the Platform Cloud org. They also dug into the technical trade-offs I made when building Bastion, focusing hea…

Technical Screen0
UberSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Matrix Swaps and Infrastructure Design

The author describes an Uber infrastructure-backend interview process with a phone screen and three virtual-onsite rounds. The screen asked for a valid sequence of adjacent swaps that arranges a matrix into alternating-direction sorted rows, followed by discussion of reducing the number of operations. The applicant had to create tests and found the time limit demanding. Onsite coding involved rep…

Onsite0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Model Deep Dives and Organization-Chart Coding

The author describes Snapchat onsite sessions divided between a short values-and-project discussion and approximately 50 minutes on the round’s technical subject. Values questions emphasized AI applications, prioritization, and empathy. The machine-learning discussion examined project decisions and training problems, including normalization, regularization, loss functions, and different predictio…

Onsite0
SquarepointDesk Quant Analyst
Sep 2026

A Screen Full of Probability Puzzles and Finance Basics

Let X and Y be independent Uniform(0,1) random variables. What is the probability that the product is greater than one-half? Imagine we have a deck with 52 cards and play a game: I draw one card randomly, then you draw one from the remaining 51 cards. The higher card wins. If the two cards have the same rank, we return them, shuffle, and repeat the draw until a winner is determined. Who has the h…

Technical Screen0
Charta HealthSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen and Four Onsite Rounds

Technical Phone Screen Rate limiter. Onsite Round 1: Coding Given a node, find its in-order successor. The description of the successor was the node with the smallest value among all nodes whose values are greater than the given node's value. Round 2: System Design Design a system that generates the corresponding output for a given input. Similar inputs should also be able to generate the same ou…

Onsite2
OraclePlatform EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

First Technical Round

Round 1: Technical Interview Maximum of Minimums of Every Window Given an array A of size n and an integer x, implement the following steps: Consider every contiguous subarray of length x, or sliding window. Find the minimum value in each window. Return the maximum of all those minimum values. For example, A = [1, 3, -1, 5, 3, 6] and x = 3: The final return value is 3. The main point of the quest…

Technical Screen2
NextdoorSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Solved Both Screens, Then Rejected

This was for a Senior general SDE role, so there were two phone screens. Both were known questions. I had prepared every question in the question bank, written each one out once, and prepared all the follow-ups. I don't think there should have been any problems with my answers. Merge weekday time intervals: I could define the input and output formats myself. I chose ["Mon 09:00", "Mon 17:00"]. In…

RejectedTechnical Screen2
Hudson River TradingData Scientist
Sep 2026

An OA and a Mean-versus-Median Estimation Interview

I recently finished HRT's OA and first Zoom interview. Sharing the questions here—hope this helps people interviewing later! OA I received the coding OA invitation a few days ago and finished it today. There were three questions: Fancy Number A fancy number is a number that contains only 0 and 1 when written in base 4. Given n, return the count of fancy numbers smaller than n. This probably needs…

In progressTechnical Screen1
Qualified HealthSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

An Agent/RAG System for 200 Documents per Session

System design interview question: An Agent / RAG chat system supporting uploads of 200 documents 📌 Core Problem > Design an enterprise LLM agent question-answering system that lets users upload external documents in batches within one session, up to 200 documents, and have real-time streaming question-and-answer exchanges and multi-turn interactions about their contents. 🎯 System Requirements and…

Onsite0
J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Minimizing a String by Removing AB and BB

[Problem description] Given a string seq consisting only of the characters 'A' and 'B'. You can repeatedly perform the following operation: Delete any occurrence of the substring "AB" or "BB". After deletion, the remaining parts of the string are joined together. Your task is to determine the minimum possible length of the string after any number of valid deletions. Note: A substring is a contigu…

Online Assessment0
ZipHQSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Backend Practical on a Questionnaire Evaluator, Rejected

After HR reached out to me, we scheduled the backend practical interview. Questions: adding features on top of a questionnaire parsing system and condition evaluator Part 1: enable numeric question input and condition evaluator (in addition to text input) enable functionality create new test cases Part 2: enable multiple condition evaluation Enable AND/OR on different conditions of different ques…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
VerkadaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Confusing Camera-Logging API Screen

This one was exactly the same as another report I'd read on here. The interview itself was nice, though the interviewer spent a good chunk of time just explaining the problem. The gist of it: the cameras generate some logs, and we needed to implement a middle-layer API server so that users could communicate with the cameras (sending requests and sending logs). We didn't need to worry about where…

Technical Screen1
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Devbox System Design Phone Screen, Built the Wrong Thing

I was asked the devbox design question and I failed to recognize it as such, since I didn't practice it much, nor was it among the hot questions on the forum. I ended up creating a generic container orchestration platform. Another interview-prep site I looked at does mark it as a MUST, so it would be useful for other candidates to peek at other question lists too. The interview experience was ove…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

findBestAnagram, Three BQs, Downleveled from L5 to L4 After R1

Coding: findBestAnagram For details, see these two posts on LeetCode Discuss: a Google L3/L4 phone screen post Round 2 of a Google SWE II (L3) post BQ: Conflict: Tell me about a time you have to compromise, and how will you act differently after it. Are you satisfied with the result? Did you do anything to make it happen later? Imagine you’re part of the Google Photos team, and your feature detec…

In progressTechnical Screen0
Physical IntelligenceSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Hand-Coding a Cache, Then a 90-Minute Mini Project Running 4-5 AI Agents

I'm still in the process, so I'll mainly go over the flow and format of each round. After mass-applying, the first round was a 45-minute HM round, mostly chatting about my background. Then 1h of hand-coding. They provided a VS Code SSH environment and a project skeleton. HR had told me ahead of time that the rough scope would be backend and DB related, and in the end it was mainly implementing a…

In progressTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

L4 Most-Active-User Coding Went Fine, Rejected After a Relentless BQ Round

Coding: There are different messages, undirected (A, B). I had to write a method register to store these messages, and another method mostActiveUser() that computes and returns the person who has messaged the most users. I clarified the problem, used a hashmap, and finished writing it quickly. For space complexity I said O(N) at first, but he pointed out that every key maps to its own set, and I…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Transformer Bug Hunt with KV Cache from Scratch and a Five-Part Plant Infection Problem

Hi, I am preparing for OpenAI's ML coding interview and have summarized the ML coding questions mentioned in the OpenAI/Anthropic interview rounds I have given so far. Anthropic Research Fundamentals Round: It was related to implementing an ML algo and discussing various research/mathematical aspects around it. OpenAI ML Coding (Transformer Debugging): Debugging 4-5 implanted bugs in the transfor…

Technical Screen0
LyftSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Messenger Design and a Next-Day Pass

The target level was Senior. The process was bizarre, but I'll leave that aside. Overall, the interviews weren't difficult. Surprisingly, the hardest coding problem was in the phone screen. Phone-screen coding: LeetCode 76. VO 1: The behavioral round. They asked about my past projects, which project I was proudest of, how I had moved projects forward with colleagues over the past two years, and s…

Onsite1
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Onsite with Grid Design and an Infection Coding Round

I finished my onsite last week, so I'm sharing my experience before the result comes out. Design: grid. I hadn't looked at any interview reports and was totally clueless. The interviewer was really nice and kept guiding me, and in the end I managed to come up with some stuff, but it's probably not looking good. Project: I talked about a fairly big product that I recently led the launch of. The sc…

In progressOnsite0

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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