Interview Experiences

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

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AttentiveSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Back-to-Back Phone Screens, Binary Search on Logs and a 3 Requests/Second API Limit

I had two phone screens back to back. Coding: binary search on logs, a variant of a problem that is already on the forum. The twist is that the log timestamps can be duplicated, and the time window I have to return is all inclusive, [start, end]. Also, start and end can fall outside the time range of the current dataset. System design: it was kind of like pulling data from a third party, and I fi…

Technical Screen0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A 90-Minute AI-Assisted OA and Next-Day Rejection

I took the Instacart Full-Stack Engineer Assessment on Codesignal on September, after referred by an employee of the company. It was similar to what posted in the platform here: 5 questions, 90 minutes. Two questions involved chatting with the AI to get the requirements. Two AI assisted Coding with Claude Code, and One bug fixing question withouot AI. There was a tab that showed the live results…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

L4 Timeline, Meeting Rooms II, and an Offline-Sync Design Round

07/27: got the questionnaire 08/11: recruiter connected 08/24: R1, and R2 got scheduled the same day 09/17: R2 Coding 1: Meeting Rooms II Coding 2: Jump Game Design: design the client-side part of a system where users can edit some data. The network isn't always reliable, so while editing it needs to support local storage, and sync the edits with the server once the network comes back. There can…

Onsite0
Point72Quantitative ResearcherIntern
Sep 2026

Two Teams and a Lasso Derivation

I applied for QR Intern and QR Alpha Intern positions based in Hong Kong. There was no online assessment. HR matched me with two teams. One Hong Kong team working on APAC equities. Three interviewers, one PM, one MLE, and one QR, for 30 minutes. They mainly asked about an internship on my resume involving quantitative work and algorithms, in very fine detail. I basically had to explain every step…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
RedditMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Onsite with a Cat/Dog Comment-Tree Filter and a Comment-Likelihood ML Design

Coding: seems like a new question? I had AI rewrite it: You are given a dictionary of Reddit comments. Each comment contains: id parent_comment body cat: whether the comment is about cats dog: whether the comment is about dogs Example input: Comments form a tree using parent_comment. There are two user modes: CAT_PERSON: does not want to see dog-related comments DOG_PERSON: does not want to see c…

Onsite0
RampSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

URL Maze BFS Tech Screen with Flaky 503s and a Silent Interviewer

Just finished my Ramp tech screen today, so here's the writeup. Process: one hour, one question, 5 minutes of Q&A at the end. Question: URL Maze (a classic that keeps showing up in past interview reports) You're given a start URL. Calling it returns JSON where the key is next_stops and the value is a list of paths. You append each path to the host and keep visiting, until some URL returns {"messa…

In progressTechnical Screen0
TeslaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Seven-Hour Palo Alto Onsite, Failed at a Last-Minute HM Round

A few months ago an HR person from Tesla reached out to me about a senior SDE role on an infra team under Tesla AI. I originally didn't have much interest in Tesla, but HR said their package could go up to twice my current package, which instantly got my attention, so I went and did the whole loop. Tesla hires by team, so the interview process and content are entirely decided by the team. It star…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Bootstrap Phone Screen, Consistent Hashing Debug Round, AI Coding DAG, Rejected

Phone screen: it was the classic bootstrap question, same as most of the interview reports out there. The hard part of the question is adding the HTTP response status handling on top. I strongly recommend the public EngineBogie write-up of this one ("Implement a BootstrapService to aggregate data from multiple services"). Onsite: Debug: the question was the same round robin one. It's actually not…

RejectedOnsite1
SnowflakeMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

In-Person Onsite with an AI-Augmented Rate Limiter Round and a Reference Check Before the Offer

It's actually been a while since I interviewed, but I was recently looking back on my job switch this year and it came to mind. It was a pretty distinctive interview experience, so I'm writing it down to give back to the forum. I'm an MLE. Every other company I interviewed with leaned toward models; this was the only one that leaned toward agents, and the title was very on-trend: "AI Engineer". T…

OfferOnsite0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Pin-Board BFS Phone Screen, All Tests Passed, Still Rejected

This is a question other people have already posted. The input is three parameters. The first one is the pins that belong to each topic board. For example, a travel board has pins for maple leaves, ocean waves, and a lake, and a home board has pins for a bedroom, a living room, and renovation. So one topic covers an array of pins. The second parameter is the starting pin, and the third parameter…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Four CodeSignal Tasks Without a Recruiter Call

The author reports receiving a four-question CodeSignal assessment from Capital One without prior recruiter contact. One task involved a basic array operation, but the author could not recall its details. The other tasks concerned alternating high and low values around a circular array, identifying a smaller pattern within a numeric matrix, and determining whether segments fit on a number line co…

Online Assessment0
InstacartSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Fast Coding and a Difficult Bar Raiser

The virtual onsite had two coding rounds, one design round, and one bar-raiser round. The coding questions were ones from interview reports, and easier than the versions on the forum. I breezed through both. For the calculate-expression question, the interviewer said in part two that there would always be spaces around the +, =, and - signs, so parsing was straightforward. In part three, the only…

RejectedOnsite2
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Withdrew from the SDE II Virtual Onsite

Some details have been intentionally obscured. HR reached out on LinkedIn. I ignored the first message, but then they messaged once a week for the next two weeks. I wasn't doing much, so I thought I might as well interview and see. At the end of July, I took the OA for position one and received a phone-screen invitation the next day. One question involved a drone delivering packages clockwise aro…

WithdrewOnsite1
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

An Unfamiliar IoT Log-Platform Design Question

Coding: KV store. System design: This seemed to be a new question. I don't think I'd seen it in interview reports. Design an IoT log platform: Large numbers of devices continuously collect logs both online and offline, and upload them in batches when online. The platform can also send requests to devices asking them to record particular types of logs. The platform needs to receive and store logs…

RejectedTechnical Screen1
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Behavioral Plus a %KEY% Env-Var Parser, Rejected After R1

Background 2.5 years of experience, Java backend at the "banana" company. Timeline 5/7 mass-applied to SWE III - Bay Area 7/8 xWF reached out (I did the GHA last year and then got rejected at the resume stage, so this time it was skipped entirely) 8/5 R1 day R1 was all on one day: 45 min behavioral + 45 min technical. Behavioral Self-intro first, then pretty common questions. The main ones they a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
FalconXSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

OA on the Longest Risk-Limited Trade-Log Window

Build an audit module for a high-frequency trading platform that processes an asynchronous, out-of-order data stream containing trade execution logs from multiple exchanges. The task is to reconstruct the chronological execution timeline for a specified exchange (target_venue), and find the maximum number of consecutive trade logs in a contiguous execution window that satisfies specific operation…

Online Assessment0
GoogleSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

Two OA Questions: Score Buckets and Reading Chapters by Day

Question 1: Given an array of integers (vector of ints), the index represents a student ID and the corresponding value is that student's score on the exam. The grading criteria are as follows: failed < 50%: failed 50% <= score <= 80%: regular pass > 80%: pass with distinction Return an array of 3 elements, representing the number of students who failed, the number with a regular pass, and the num…

Online Assessment0
EaseSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A "Debugging" Round That Was Really a Key-Value Store Without a Dictionary

Implement a key value store without a dictionary or set. I was told that this round was going to be a debugging session. The interviewer gave the question above. Mistakes that I made: I did not start with a class definition. The interviewer pointed it out, so I eventually started with a class definition. The interviewer kept asking me about cache collision. I raised an exception for the cache col…

Technical Screen0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

SDE-2 Loop with an AI-Assisted Design Round and a Linux cp Deep Dive

Round 1 The first problem was a variant of Longest Repeating Character Replacement. We discussed both the brute-force and the optimal solution in the interview, and I implemented it. The second problem was a Medium-difficulty tree traversal question. We also discussed some basic DSA concepts. Round 2 Design a notification system for Windows that lets different applications generate and display no…

Onsite0
IntuitMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Measuring Meeting-Free Work Time

The report presents an Intuit AI Science technical-screen exercise reconstructed from images. The task uses a year of company meeting records to assess how much uninterrupted coding time employees have during business hours. Each attendance record identifies an employee and a meeting, together with joining and leaving times. Candidates are asked to determine the longest available interval for eac…

Technical 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.

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