Interview Experiences

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

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4457 stories

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ServiceTitanCustomer Success Engineer
Reported May 2026

ServiceTitan Customer Success Engineer: recruiter screen ended after twenty minutes

My recruiter screen started badly and never recovered. The questions were fairly basic for customer success, including how many accounts I’d managed and a scenario involving an escalation and churn risk I’d handled. The recruiter spoke extremely fast and seemed focused on specific keywords instead of trying to understand me. I had little room to ask questions, and the call ended early, after abou…

No responseHR Screen0
GrammarlySoftware Engineer
Reported May 2026

Grammarly Software Engineer interview with HackerRank and technical coding

My process started with a HackerRank coding assessment. After that, I had an HR screening round that felt more like a checkpoint than a detailed conversation. The main work came next in a technical coding interview, followed by additional rounds that combined engineering depth with questions about cultural fit. The process felt difficult mainly because the technical portion required real problem-…

Online Assessment0
SpotifyBackend Engineer
Reported May 2026

Spotify Backend Engineer interview with unexpected domain questions

I started with an initial screening, which led to a technical screen divided into three parts: a discussion of my project, domain questions, and LeetCode-style coding. I expected the domain questions to relate to the project I’d discussed, but the atmosphere felt cold. During the domain section, the interviewer seemed to jump around and choose questions on the spot. I got a lot of basic, exam-lik…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SpotifyData Engineer
Reported May 2026

Spotify Data Engineer interview with a demanding coding round

After a conversation with a recruiter, I had a coding-focused round that I expected to be straightforward. It turned out to be difficult. The round was with two senior engineers, and the pace felt demanding. I remember feeling that I needed to be much more fluent with interview-style practice than I actually was, and that gap made the interview harder than it should have been. I didn't receive an…

HR Screen0
ServiceTitanAccount Executive
Reported May 2026

ServiceTitan Account Executive interview with mismatched role-play expectations

The process started well. The recruiter was polite and interested, and I felt there was a genuine handoff to the next round. The sales-manager stage then took a sharp turn. The managers didn't seem prepared, and the expectations didn't match what I had been told beforehand. The material said the mock exercise would involve simple objection handling and wouldn't require deep product knowledge. Dur…

OfferHR Screen0
DuolingoSoftware Engineer
Reported May 2026

Duolingo Software Engineer interview with multiple phone screens before the onsite

The process took much longer than I expected and didn't feel organized. I went through a standard recruiter screen, followed by several additional phone screens, before finally reaching an onsite. The recruiter and each later step made it seem as if things were moving forward, but the overall experience felt tedious and drawn out. By the time I reached the onsite, I was tired of the pacing and re…

Onsite0
SpotifyData Engineer
Reported May 2026

Spotify Data Engineer interview: 12-minute phone screen

My process started with a recruiter chat about my background and visa status. The phone screen was pretty quick, and the scheduling felt a little chaotic. I realized the interviewer was in a rush, and the call, which was supposed to last about half an hour, ended after roughly 12 minutes. Even with the short, hurried conversation, I was selected to move on to the next round. I felt like there was…

0
GrammarlyAccount Executive
Reported May 2026

Grammarly Account Executive interview: mock qualification call and AE debrief

My process was shorter and felt focused on getting to a clear signal early. I started with a recruiter interaction where I talked through my background and interest. Then I had a second conversation that went deeper in a similar style, followed by a mock qualification and discovery call and an AE debrief. What surprised me was how quickly the mock call fed into the decision. I expected more conve…

RejectedOther0
KlaviyoSoftware Engineer
Reported May 2026

Klaviyo Software Engineer interview, CodeSignal unlock sequence

I applied, and the recruiter reached out quickly by email and through the candidate portal. The recruiter call was easy and straightforward, and they accommodated my timeline so I could move directly to an assessment through CodeSignal. The assessment worked like an online unlock sequence. Getting a full score on one problem allowed me to move to the next. I didn’t pass overall, but I was told th…

Online Assessment0
DocusignSoftware Engineer
Reported May 2026

Docusign Software Engineer interview with a behavioral-only session

I had a lightweight, behavioral-focused experience for a software engineer internship track. Before anything technical happened, the recruiter arranged the process and checked what scheduling worked for me. The logistics felt fairly smooth, and I appreciated that the recruiter stayed in contact and helped map out the timing. When the interview took place, it stayed entirely behavioral. There were…

Other0
AmazonSoftware EngineerNew Grad
May 2026

A Bar Raiser and Three Coding Rounds

R1: Bar Raiser The first interview was the Bar Raiser. It contained only behavioral questions and no coding. R2 Coding: Minimum Point Consumption Across Multiple Programs Problem description A user has points from different programs, such as airline miles, credit-card points, and store points. Each program has a different redemption rate, and the rates change daily. The user wants to pay a fixed…

Technical Screen0
LyftSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Onsite Loop with a Paginated Fetch Design and a Job Scheduler

Onsite. They gave me a long chunk of existing code and asked me to implement a function based on it. Essentially there's a fetch(page) function that returns the items on that page along with the next page's nextPage. We needed to implement fetch_n as a method on another class, so that we could pull n elements continuously. Each call continues extracting from wherever the last call left off, so th…

Onsite0
RipplingSoftware EngineerSenior+
May 2026

Phone Screens Plus a Four-Part AI-Team Onsite Building a Live LLM Chatbot

I interviewed with Rippling's new AI department, which has 3 teams and an already-launched product. Their main product is an internal chat agent system that can integrate with hundreds of integrations on top of employee data to answer all kinds of questions. Recruiter - 30 minutes. Talked about which project of mine stood out to them, my involvement in it, and whether I had led any projects of my…

Onsite0
DistylAI EngineerSenior+
May 2026

A Whisper Streaming Take-home, Then System Design and a Deploy Deep Dive

I interviewed for AI Engineer + Backend. First was the recruiter, who asked a lot about customer and user experience, because Distyl does a lot of custom solutions for traditional companies building AI-related products, so it mostly revolved around development experience working with clients — kind of felt like interviewing for an FDE role. I applied for AI Engineer, and the recruiter said the wh…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Hacker Rank OA With an AI-Assisted Coding Question

As the title says, I applied around the end of February this year. Last Tuesday I did the hiring assessment, and right after that the OA got sent out. It's a Hacker Rank test, and it feels pretty different from the CodeSignal OA that the earlier new-grad wave got, so I wanted to write it up and share. There are two questions total, and they explicitly said some questions let you use an AI tool, w…

In progressOnline Assessment0
Interactive BrokersSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

A 1-Hour OA With Math Puzzles and a Progressive Tax Bracket Coding Problem

Last week I got a call from an IB recruiter asking if I wanted to try out for an SDE role. After I confirmed, I quickly got an OA scheduled — one hour. The OA was split into two parts. Part 1 was middle-school-level math multiple choice. F(x) = 3x - 1, f(f(x)) = 1, what's x? Answer: 5/9 I don't remember this one at all — it should have been a pretty simple question. A square is made up of three e…

Online Assessment0
CoinbaseSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

A New Flappy-Bird OA With Coins Instead of Pipes

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

Online AssessmentXP0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

ML Fundamentals, Transformers, and a Botched Course Schedule

The overall process was a standard technical phone screen: they first asked some ML fundamentals and project-related concepts, then asked about transformers, and finished with an algorithm question. Overall I felt the interviewer cared a lot about how solid your fundamentals are, especially ML concepts and coding correctness. The first part was ML fundamentals, mainly about overfitting and how to…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

New AI Coding, Debug, and Integration Questions

Kind of speechless — I ran into new questions on both the integration round and the debug round, and I also got to try out the newest AI coding format. This was for the Java track. AI coding: In HackerRank, there's an AI chat box where you write prompts based on the requirements to get the code solved. If you try to write it by hand yourself, there's about an 80% chance you won't finish in time —…

Onsite0
ByteDanceSite Reliability Engineer
Apr 2026

Coding Round Caught Me Off Guard, Rejected

I mass-applied online. They reached out within 1-2 days, and the interview got scheduled right away. The first round was pretty easy — a binary search type problem, not from LeetCode. Find something in a sorted array. I spent a good chunk of the remaining time just chatting with the interviewer about the company. For the second round I was expecting behavioral/fundamentals stuff — Linux/network/k…

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