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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OmnissaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Five Rounds from C# LLD to Notification Design

Round 1: Screening / Practical Coding (HackerRank) This was a practical low-level design coding problem based on a real scenario, and I was required to use C#. Given an existing repository class, I had to implement and complete every method in a Service class so that it passed the test cases. The main focus was how I organized the code, wrote clean code, handled edge cases, and thought through an…

Onsite1
SocureSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Designing Twitter for Timeline Scale and High Availability

Interview question: Design Twitter. This was a system design question, and the overall task was simply to design Twitter/X. They first asked about the basic functional requirements: Create an account Let users post tweets Follow and unfollow users View the home timeline Like and retweet Comment View trending or popular tweets Then they asked me to draw the overall architecture and the core entiti…

Technical Screen1
Capital OneMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Four-Question OA, Left Q3 Blank and Tripped on the Digit-Swap Problem

Catching up on a write-up for the C1 AI Engineer OA I did a while back, which I failed. 4 questions total, 1 hour 10 minutes. The first two were really easy. I can't remember what they were, but they were just really easy, you can finish them in 10 minutes. I didn't understand question 3, so I skipped it and went to do question 4, and in the end I had no time to come back to it, so it was complet…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
MercorSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Applied AI Tech Screen with an Async Refund Debugging Question and Rapid-Fire LLM Questions

Today I had a tech screen for Mercor's Applied AI role. The debugging question: The other rapid-fire questions: What is idempotency, and why do we need idempotent operations? What is RAG, and how is it related to fine-tuning? How would you handle context limit exceeded in an LLM application? LLM calls are usually stateless. How would you make an LLM application stateful? How would you handle prom…

Technical Screen0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Fractional-Share Inventory

The author describes a first-round Robinhood coding interview about handling customer trades when an exchange accepts only whole shares. The exercise tracked fractional inventory by symbol, covered purchases and sales, and included orders expressed either in shares or in money. Exchange transactions had to leave each inventory balance nonnegative and below one share after an order. The supplied f…

Technical Screen0
AtlassianSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Music Player Design and Product Discussions

The author describes interviewing for an ML/AI product engineering role with BCNY, a small company acquired by Atlassian, and cautions that this team’s process may differ. A phone screen used a music-player exercise to assess object-oriented design and communication, including playback controls, queuing, repeat behavior, and shuffled playlists. Onsite discussions included designing comments for a…

Onsite0
MetaData EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Leadership and Fullstack Phone Screen, Rejected Over 'Not Enough Impact'

From the recruiter to the interviewers, the whole thing gave off an absurd vibe. I was applying for a senior position, and the job description didn't even list a level at the time. After I applied, the recruiter had me submit my availability directly — no call at all. Once it was scheduled, I was told it would be one Leadership round and one Fullstack round. I thought that was a little strange at…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MercorSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Rushed 30-Minute Screen on Sorting, Probability, and a Cache Race Condition

The interviewer was a principal from Caltech. He talked fast and used a lot of technical jargon, like a college professor would. It was rushed, only 30 minutes. Explain a sorting algorithm better than O(N^2). Merge sort — recursively split the array into left and right halves until there are only 2 elements left, then merge by inserting the smaller of the two into a new array and returning it (N…

Technical Screen0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Full-Stack CodeSignal Challenge With No Tests to Check My Work

I recently completed an Instacart CodeSignal assessment that was very different from the usual LeetCode-style rounds. It was a full-stack repository-based assessment, and some sections required me to have conversations with an AI "Product Manager" before making changes. Very annoying. Because unlike other CodeSignal rounds there are no tests to test against!! So I had no idea how well I did and u…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
CitadelSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

File Deduplication, Size Checks, and Reference Counts

My first Citadel SWE interview. The interviewer was on the hedge fund side. I gave a brief introduction. Before I had a chance to tell the behavioral stories I'd prepared, he went straight into technical questions. The interview was basically 100% coding and system design. Problem: Suppose a file system contains files with identical contents. For example, /a/b/c.txt and /a/b/e.txt both contain th…

Technical Screen1
SpaceXResearch ScientistNew Grad
Sep 2026

Speculative Decoding in a 60-Minute ML Coding Round

There were two 60-minute interviews: an ML coding round and a research chat. The ML coding round asked me to implement speculative decoding. I needed to write one normal decoding function and one speculative decoding function. The speculative function had the following interface in the prompt: The test case required the speculative-decoding implementation to produce its output faster than the nor…

Technical Screen1
RivianSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Sensors, Camera Failures, and a False-Positive Case Study

A recruiter contacted me, and I then interviewed with the hiring manager for an autonomous-vehicle systems role. The interview lasted one hour and began with brief introductions from both of us. The manager then gave me a set of driving capabilities and asked how I would choose the types and placement of sensors needed to support those capabilities. Next, I was asked about the external failure mo…

Technical Screen1
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two Onsite Coding Rounds and Communication Friction

r1 Given a connections array, where connections[x] is a list representing the neighboring nodes of x in a graph, and a broken value representing a damaged node, return the minimum number of nodes that must be traversed from start to destination without passing through broken. The solution could use DFS or BFS. I used DFS. The follow-up allowed traversal through broken nodes. r2 Implement a word p…

In progressOnsite1
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two Coding Rounds and Four Problems

IC1 phone screen, with two coding rounds. The interviewers were all very nice. I hope they will show mercy and let me pass. 🙏 Here is the timeline as well: 8/3: Referral 8/4: Scheduled the HR call 8/7: HR call, then the interview was scheduled that same day 9/3: Virtual onsite with two rounds First round: Question 1: Throne Inheritance. The only difference was that init did not provide the king.…

In progressTechnical Screen0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Real-Time 3D Playback Design, Then a 2-Hour AI-Assisted Build

A 30-minute panel. It starts with a self-introduction, but the intro itself isn't the point. The main thing is that you need to explain why you're interested in the company's mission, so look up the mission statement on their website beforehand and talk about it. System design, 45 minutes. It was to build a real-time 3D playback system given logs of data. It's the toy-car modeling question that h…

Onsite0
Latent HealthSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

A 45-Minute System Design Screen on Prior Authorization Workflows

Role: Software Engineer (interviewer said they're targeting senior level) Round: System design phone screen Duration: 45 minutes (~5 min intros, ~35 min design, ~5 min candidate Q&A) Format: Screen share + Excalidraw (bring your own whiteboard tool — have a link ready) Background (given by the interviewer, ~4 minutes) Latent Health's first product is in the prior authorization (PA) space. The int…

Technical Screen0
TemuSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Technical Round Skipped, Final Round Is Just HR and Salary Talk

Last time I mentioned that after a 2.5-hour second round I felt like I'd failed, but I actually hadn't. The second-round interviewer (the dept lead) decided to skip the third-round technical round entirely, so my third round ended up being the final round too — just a chat with HR. A bit about my background, some basic behavioral questions, and then talking about what it's like working there and…

In progressTechnical Screen0
SalesforceSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

VP Chat, Four Rounds, Then Team Matching

Cross Cloud org. Round 1 was a chat with a VP. Round 2 was an OA; one of the questions was problem 443. Round 3 was two VOs, one coding and one system design. The coding was problem 460. The system design was to design a coffee shop order system. Round 4 was the onsite, same as above. The coding question was the same as the one in another thread on this forum — maybe a bit more complex, because y…

In progressOnsite0
American ExpressSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Three OA Problems, One a Pizza Discount Simulation

First question: given a 3x3 grid with stones placed on it — some cells may have more than one stone, and some cells may be empty — move stones between adjacent cells so that every cell ends up with exactly one stone. Find the minimum number of moves needed. This corresponds to LeetCode 2850, Minimum Moves to Spread Stones Over Grid. Second question: given a set of 2D coordinate points (x, y) and…

Online Assessment0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Onsite With Two System Design Rounds and Escalating Follow-ups

Round 1 — Behavioral A standard set of leadership questions, one by one: Self-introduction Pick a project where you had the strongest ownership, or learned the most from, and go deep on it How did you measure success for this project? What's the strongest team environment you've been part of? A time you had to make a fast decision and live with the consequences A time you got constructive feedbac…

Onsite0

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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