Interview Experiences

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

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4433 stories

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BytedanceSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Two Easy Rounds, Then a Camera-Off Grilling in Chinese

ByteDance's recruiter scheduled my interviews one round at a time, and never told me in advance what any round would actually cover — I only ever found out the time and length of the next round. Round 1: The interviewer was based in the Bay Area. He gave me a problem about the longest subarray of consecutive 1s — a sliding window problem I solved in seconds — with a follow-up on the 2D version. I…

RejectedOnsite0
UpstartSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Three OA Questions, Stuck on a Grid-Search Timeout

There were three questions in total, and two of them hadn't shown up in any interview reports before. Given a list of coordinates (x, y), find the min x, min y, max_x - min_x, and max_y - min_y. The problem statement was basically: filter out (name, score) pairs where the score is above a threshold, keep everything below the threshold, then find the max score among what's left and return its name…

Online Assessment0
AffirmSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Fraud Detection Coding and a Payment System Design Round

Four rounds total: one hour of coding + half an hour of behavioral questions + one hour of system design + half an hour of behavioral questions. The two behavioral rounds were just the standard questions. Coding round (the prompt was long, but not hard): Part 1: Live Fraud Detector (Debug Existing Function) Description One of Affirm's competitive edges is our ability to do credit underwriting and…

Onsite0
UberMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Withdrew After a Possible L5A-to-L4 Downlevel

I interviewed for a Sr MLE / MLE role. The whole process was pretty short — in the end, after HR indicated I might get downleveled from L5A to L4, I decided not to move forward, so this is basically a withdrawal report. The first round was mainly a project deep dive. It opened with self-introductions, then the interviewer asked me to walk through a recent representative project. I talked about a…

WithdrewTechnical Screen0
AdobeSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Five Relaxed Rounds Built Around OOP and API Design

This one felt pretty comfortable to interview with — slow pace, none of that being-chased-the-whole-time feeling. Each round was an hour, and in some rounds close to half the time was just chatting. The problems were medium-to-easy, but they really like steering things toward object-oriented design and code design — the questions here are different from what other companies ask. A quick note: I'm…

Onsite0
UberSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Phone Screen, Four Onsite Rounds, Interviewers Replying to Work Messages

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

In progressOnsiteXP0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Periodic Table Word Puzzle Phone Screen, Two Onsite DSA Rounds

Phone Interview Given all the element symbols from the periodic table and a target word, return the total number of possible ways to compose that word using the element symbols. For example, "Physics" can be composed in the following ways: P - H - Y - Si - C - S P - H - Y - Si - Cs P - H - Y - S - I - C - S P - H - Y - S - I - Cs Onsite Round 1 (DSA) Given n players (numbered 0 to n - 1) and a se…

Onsite0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

A malloc Phone Screen and a Surprise Debugging Round

Sharing an OpenAI interview report. Aside from the phone screen, everything was a question I'd already seen before — because I over-prepared from question banks and cared way too much about the outcome, I interviewed badly. I really regret it. The phone screen covered malloc, which others have already shared — the details aren't much different. There were two parts: first a naive first-fit soluti…

Onsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Phone Screen and Onsite Reject, Struggling With the AI-Coding Rounds

First round phone screen: I picked AI coding, and it was the logger question that's been posted on the forum. Roughly: the first question was to implement the following functionality, where each feature could be triggered and then print out the logger: Removes all occurrences of a configured string before printing. Truncates the message to a max number of characters before printing. Capitalizes t…

RejectedOnsite0
ExaResearch Engineer
Apr 2026

Two Phone Screens, One 40-Minute t-digest Derivation

Haven't seen anyone share about this company on the forum, so let me be the first to post. Research Engineer — two phone screens total. Round 1: Mostly a PyTorch contrastive loss debugging exercise. Basically just fixing some matmul shape mismatches. Once I got it working, there were no more issues. The interviewer was a young guy, really nice, and he even guided me toward the right direction. Ac…

Technical Screen0
UberSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

QuadTree Screen That I Ended Early

They asked me how to build a QuadTree. There's a similar problem on LeetCode (the original post referenced it in a garbled, obfuscated way, probably to dodge the forum's keyword filter), but the interview version wasn't limited to just 0s and 1s — the description given was pretty high-level, and I had to implement the data structure from scratch by hand. I'd solved this problem more than once, th…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MicrosoftMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

Four Rounds on the Bing Team, No Offer

I applied to several MAI positions on the site, and then a Bing team doing image search got back to me and said they wanted to schedule an interview. First, let me complain about the HR — from the email address, it's clearly outsourced, and they never reply. For example, I asked what kind of interview this was, what it would cover, how many rounds — no idea at all. They'd only show up two or thre…

RejectedOnsite0
WhoopiOS EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected on System Design

I recently interviewed for a Senior iOS position at WHOOP (had a referral). Got rejected on the last round of the onsite, System Design. Didn't make it. My overall impression of this company's interview process was really, really good. The company also supports H1B and green card, so I hope anyone who needs that applies quickly. First, my impressions of WHOOP: Very efficient — from the initial co…

RejectedOnsite0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Passed Two Screens, Stuck on No Headcount

I had two phone interviews (technical screens). Round 1 was probably a new question from the interviewer — really hard. Given a set of node groups (e.g. [[1],[2,3],[4,5,6]]), connect all the groups into one connected graph. The way to connect: pick one node at random from each of two different groups and build an edge between them. The final graph needs to be connected, using the minimum number o…

No responseTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Easy Coding Question, Confusing Rename Follow-up, Rejected

Coding: convert snake_case to camelCase (e.g. foo_bar -> fooBar). The input is guaranteed to be valid snake_case (no leading underscore, no trailing underscore, no double underscore). The coding part was easy, I banged it out in under twenty lines within a few minutes, though I did spend a bit of time clarifying what counted as valid snake_case input since I wasn't totally sure what the interview…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Walmart LabsPrincipal Data AnalystSenior+
Apr 2026

Five Rounds, SQL Live Coding to a Senior Director Case Study

This write-up was drafted with ChatGPT's help based on the reflection notes I wrote after each round, so some of the phrasing may sound a bit AI-generated — I hope that's okay, the content matches what I want to convey. I've noticed there are a lot of DS interview write-ups here but not many DA ones, so hopefully this helps people looking for DA roles. I recently got an offer for a Walmart Princi…

OfferOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Full Onsite Loop, Rejected at the HM Round

It's a bit of a shame — I ended up getting rejected at the HM round. I think I went through a relatively new process: complete the full interview loop first, then do team match afterward. Phone Screen The question was File Deduplication. The whole conversation went smoothly and I didn't feel like there were any obvious issues. About an hour after the interview ended, I got notified that a Virtual…

RejectedOnsite0
Mistral AISoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Two CodeSignal Rounds, Ran Out of Time on the DP Question

French AI company, the interviewers all seemed to be based in France, but the position itself is in NYC, and the recruiter is on the US side too. I talked with the hiring manager for half an hour, then moved into the phone interview stage. Two phone interview rounds: coding + system design, both done on CodeSignal. Overall I felt the bar was pretty high. Coding Three questions total. The first tw…

Technical Screen0
CitadelData Scientist
Apr 2026

Temperature Models, Interpolation, and Streaming Regression

First question Background You are given daily temperature data for P towns and daily temperature data for New York City over the same N days. Write functions to answer several questions. Part One — five questions Q1: Which place, either one of the towns or New York City, has the greatest temperature variation, measured by standard deviation? Q2: When Town2's temperature is between 90 and 100 degr…

Technical Screen0
Gimlet LabsMember of Technical Staff, ML Systems
Apr 2026

Two System Designs and an Unexpected Rejection

This is an inference startup. The basic business is to place different stages of inference on different hardware in a forward-deployed model. For example, a company might have many old accelerator cards that no longer have enough compute for other work and use them for decoding. The role was Member of Technical Staff in machine learning systems. A recruiter approached me. I was already changing j…

RejectedOnsite0

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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