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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DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Game Logic, Referral Credits, and Chat Design

The report describes two coding sessions and a chat-system design discussion in a Databricks onsite. One coding exercise involved a turn-based board game, including player switching, board output, and correctly ending wins or draws. Its follow-up introduced automated play. The other exercise tracked account credits associated with referrals, queried accounts meeting a threshold, and extended cred…

Onsite0
ByteDanceSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Rejected After a TikTok Trust & Safety System Design Round on a Video Moderation Pipeline

Interviewed in June. Second round: system design interview, 1 hour. Project deep-dive (about 20 minutes). System Design — Video Content Moderation System Question: design a simplified video content moderation system. The interviewer scoped it very clearly: I didn't need to design the video upload part — assume there's already a system that pushes uploaded videos to you. What I needed to design wa…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnorkelSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Rejection After a SnapshotMap Problem

Snorkel AI rejection report. The interview problem was to implement a SnapshotMap. The prompt gave a fairly long background and API requirements, so the first step was to extract the core data model and operation semantics from the business description. The basic interfaces were put(k, v), get(k), and delete(k), extended with take_snapshot() and get(k, snap_id) to read a key's value from a histor…

RejectedTechnical Screen2
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Library OA, Pricing, and Inventory Design

I translated this passage into Chinese as follows: All the questions I received were exactly the same as those in another post. 0) OA: A full-stack CodeSignal repository test, with AI. A book/library management system. 1) Coding problem 1: The first problem was translating expressions (T1 = T4). 2) Coding problem 2: Calculate the total price of products in an array of strings, in the format sku|p…

Onsite1
RampSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

60-Minute CoderPad Maze Crawl Over HTTP, No Pass

Format: 60 min, live coding in CoderPad. Problem: You're given a base URL for a "maze" served over HTTP. A GET on the base URL returns JSON with a list of next step IDs: You then GET base_url/{step_id} for each step, which returns more next steps. You need to explore until you find the exit. Things to handle: Dead ends: {"next_steps": []} Flaky server: some requests return Service Temporarily Una…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Five Onsite Rounds Including a Live AI Coding Challenge

Round 1 — Code Craft: Bootstrap / Aggregator API Problem You are tasked with implementing an API that exposes the required information and is as resilient to failures as possible in order to ensure a good user experience. Implement a Bootstrap API that takes a user_id, pulls information from three existing upstream services — Consumer, Payment, and Address — and combines it into a single response…

Onsite1
TikTokSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

AI Agent Second Round in Mandarin

TikTok SWE AI Agent Intern, second-round interview report. This was the second round, and the entire conversation was in Mandarin. I started with a self-introduction, followed by a deep dive into my research project. Fundamentals / business design How HTTPS works. Explain the TLS/SSL handshake process and CA certificate validation in detail. Follow-up: During data transmission, is symmetric or as…

Technical Screen1
SocureSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Payment Queue Visibility Timeouts and Concurrency Races

Backend/SDE Coding I recently interviewed for a Backend/SDE role. The coding problem leaned toward backend work and concurrency. The problem was to implement an in-memory payment queue providing submit, receive, and ack. Requirements: submit adds a message. receive gets the next message. After a message is received, other consumers cannot get it during the visibility timeout. ack deletes it. If t…

Technical Screen1
OracleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Five Rounds from Top-K URLs to Log Collection

Screening Given a massive volume of URL access logs and limited memory, find the global Top K URLs and the Top K most frequently accessed URLs over the past 24 hours. The main focus was system-design thinking, trade-offs, and pseudocode implementation. Round 2 Given an event stream in the format (userId, eventType, timestamp), find the Top 100 users with the most events during the past hour. This…

Onsite1
PosthogProduct EngineerSenior+
Added Sep 2026

Posthog technical screen/system design

Question was basically "how would you implement analytics for a small mom and pop ecommerce site". Interviewer was a bit of a jerk and pushed back on very minute details about how analytics would be gathered in the first place instead of system design. Whatever it says in their guide about this being a conversation is not true (at least for this interviewer). You need to monologue and you get no…

RejectedTechnical Screen3
HadrianSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Three Rounds Ending in an On-site Factory Tour and a DAG Critical-Path Problem

Applied online and a recruiter reached out. Their process is like this: Round 1 1 hr live coding phone screen Round 2 45-min leadership/behavioral with an engineering director 60-min system design Round 3 On-site in Torrance with a factory tour 30-min "partnership" interview (working with non-technical stakeholders) 1 hr coding Problem: A work order is modeled as a DAG. Nodes are operations (mach…

Onsite0
AirbnbMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Search Ranking and Team Matching

A referred applicant to Airbnb’s personalization and relevance organization reports recruiter contact after two weeks. An initial coding screen asked for book titles to be formatted as a table. Four days later, the applicant advanced to a virtual onsite covering document redaction, project decisions, search ranking without text queries, and retrieval-assisted guidance for customer-support staff.…

Onsite0
AirbnbData Engineer
Sep 2026

Four-Round Onsite, Then a Recruiter Who Ghosted Me

Not many interview reports out there, so let me add mine — hope it helps. My recruiter was unreliable and ghosted me right after the interview. One round of OA. The VO (onsite) was four rounds of analytics interviews. OA: The SQL was pretty easy. The Python question gave a list/dict of city housing prices, and I had to find the median price for each city. VO: SQL: Find the top N, then figure out…

RejectedOnsite0
SiemensSenior Applied ScientistSenior+
Sep 2026

Recruiter Screen, Then a Data-Pipeline Coding Round and Rapid-Fire LLM Questions

I mass-applied online and roughly two weeks later got an email from a recruiter, scheduling a recruiter phone interview. Recruiter phone interview This round mostly asked about my related background (my experience doing LLM post-training), then three behavioral questions (an end-to-end work experience, a time I failed, a time I disagreed with someone). The recruiter said the team works on Physica…

Technical Screen0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Full Onsite Loop Plus My AI Coding Interview Playbook

Most of the questions were the classic, well-worn ones you'd already find on the forum. Phone Leetcode easy + mid Onsite 2 AI coding rounds + 2 AI system design rounds + 1 BQ AI coding 01: Friend system: Implement a friend recommendation algorithm Given data: a list of users, a list of friendships (user-user pairs) Design a strategy to recommend new friends to a user (e.g., search for friends of…

Onsite0
ScribdSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Rejected at Onsite Coding Over Missing Metrics

Interviewed for the content understanding team, mid-level, in June/July. Phone screen Structure: self-intro → why I'm leaving my current company → DB schema + SQL → a small system design question → observability → my questions for them. Schema / SQL: given a many-to-many relationship, design the tables (they wanted a join table with a composite primary key), then write the query. System design: u…

RejectedOnsite0
VerkadaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Real-Time Voting Results for a Halftime Survey

The coding question was LeetCode 36. The system design question felt new to me. I was asked to design a survey system for a Super Bowl halftime show. Each user could vote for one question, with either A or B as the result. There were two requirements: A user should be able to see the real-time result immediately after voting. The host should be able to see the accurate voting result after the eve…

RejectedTechnical Screen1
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Three Parts Passed Before Time Ran Out

The phone screen used the familiar Pins Violation Log problem. The input was a list of violation logs already sorted by timestamp. Each record had the form [postId, policy, timestamp]. There were five parts: Count unique posts by policy. Get the policies violated by a post. Count unique posts at a timestamp. Count unique posts in a time range. Count violations by policy in a time range. I had to…

Technical Screen1
UberSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Building a Directory Tree and Traversing It with a Manual Stack

The interview lasted 45 minutes. We first went through my resume. I was asked about my most challenging project and the technology stack I normally use, and the interviewer introduced the work of the hiring group. The remaining half hour was for coding. Given a series of file paths, I needed to build a directory tree and find the full path of a file in that tree. Directory names could repeat, but…

RejectedTechnical Screen1
LinkedInMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

An Ambiguous Recommender Training Task

This was a very strange interview experience. It was the interviewer's first time interviewing, and she asked me to handwrite a binary-classification machine learning loader and trainer. The data was not a real dataset, so I could not write code that would actually run. She asked for pseudocode but did not explain what level of detail she wanted. She also did not clarify what the model was suppos…

RejectedTechnical Screen1

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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