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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Machine Learning EngineerSenior+
Mar 2026

Six Full Loops, One Offer

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OfferOnsiteXP0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Distributed Coding, AI Safety, and Hardware Reasoning

The author describes four interviews for an infrastructure-oriented Anthropic role. Distributed coding covered mode and median computation using supplied messaging interfaces, with attention to partitioning and communication costs. A separate programming exercise converted sampled call stacks into function events and explored recursion and limited recent-history data. The culture discussion consi…

RejectedOnsite0
OktaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Mar 2026

Four Weekly Rounds, Then Radio Silence

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No responseTechnical ScreenXP0
GoogleMachine Learning Engineer
Mar 2026

Weak Technical Screen, Then Onsite String Search and an LC 528 Variant

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In progressOnsiteXP0
StubHubSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

HM Screen, Coding, and System Design With No Feedback From Them

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OnsiteXP0
StubHubFullstack Software Engineer IISenior+
Mar 2026

HR Downgrades the Role, Then an OOD Recommendation Engine

Position: Fullstack Software Engineer II Experience: 7 years YOE Interview with HR: First I had a call with HR, who mostly talked up how small the company is, how big each engineer's scope is, and how they acquired Viagogo in Europe and are working hard to expand. Then they asked me to walk through a project I'd led before. I had originally applied for a Sr. SDE role — I have 7 years of experienc…

Onsite0
AppleSoftware QA Engineer
Mar 2026

Accessories Team and a Final Coding Rejection

HR phone screen: Some questions about my immigration status. They pointed out that the job had to be onsite in San Diego, though the interviews could take place in Cupertino. The second round was with the hiring manager. We discussed my current work and projects, then my previous QA experience: benchmarking and regression, reducing the false-failure rate, optimizing HPC resource usage, and reduci…

RejectedOnsite0
BytedanceMachine Learning Engineer
Mar 2026

XGBoost, DP, and a Fraud-Detection System Design That Didn't Land

Interview time: February this year. Department: e-commercial team. Round 1: Self-introduction, walked through my projects. A few classic ML Q&A: Q: Why is XGBoost less prone to overfitting than a single decision tree? A: Because it's a gradient-boosting ensemble method (many weak-learner trees), it adds regularization (L1/L2, tree complexity penalties), a learning rate (shrinkage), row/column sub…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
FigmaMachine Learning Engineer
Mar 2026

Long-Winded Onsite, Two ML Design Rounds, and References Before an Offer

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OnsiteXP0
NextdoorData Scientist
Mar 2026

A Surprise Case Study, Then the Role Was Paused

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
WaymoMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Mar 2026

Two ML Design Rounds and a Coding Question I Couldn't Finish

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
UberData ScientistNew Grad
Mar 2026

Econ PhD, Two Phone Screens, Then a Verbal Offer

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OfferOnsiteXP0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

A Fast-Food Payroll System Coded Live with GPT

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

OA in April, Offer After Four VO Rounds in July

Mass-applied at the end of January. Got the OA at the end of April: Coding question 1: there's an original version of this on the forum — a circular array of drone destinations (first and last connected end to end), find the shortest path. Coding question 2: AI debug. I picked Java. The problem was an actor + movie website. Roughly the functionality: users can follow actors, and an admin can add…

OfferOnsite0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

the OA Was Basically the Same as a Study Article

The Meta RS OA wasn't too hard. I'd previously studied from an article that turned out to basically be the exact same questions. Q1: You need to find the index computed from rating divided by prices. If two entries tie, keep the one with the smaller index. When comparing, you don't need to compute the actual decimal — just cross-multiply to compare the two fractions directly. Q2: You need to comp…

Online Assessment0
AmazonSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Mar 2026

Four Rounds Ending with a Bar Raiser

round 1: behavioral questions + coding Behavioral questions: a time you made a decision with incomplete information; a time you disagreed with a teammate or your manager and how you handled it Coding: Given an array of strings, group together all words that are anagrams of each other and return the groups. The interviewer also asked me not to use the O(n·k log k) approach with sorted signatures.…

Technical Screen0
J.P. MorganQuantitative Researcher
Mar 2026

Two Screens and Long Decision Waits

The author describes two quantitative-research applications at J.P. Morgan, involving a credit team and a market/treasury risk team. Each reached one technical interview with a hiring manager. The author reports waiting several months both for interviews and for eventual rejections. The interviews required complete code written in the applicant’s own notes rather than a shared coding environment.…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
HackerRankSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Phone Screen Rejection After a Grilling System Design Round

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Failed on the Onsite's Third Round

I interviewed here earlier this year. Snap didn't seem to have any exact LeetCode-original questions, so I'm writing this mostly from memory. Round 1: You're given a list of timestamp events (unordered, can repeat), something like [12:00:01, 01:02:02, 03:03:03]. Implement a query function: given a start time and end time, compute how many events fall in that window. For example, [01:02:01, 01:02:…

RejectedOnsite0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Two AI Coding Rounds, a LeetCode System Design, and an AI-Enabled Design Round With No AI

Two AI coding rounds, one traditional system design, one AI-Enabled Design round. AI coding 1: Max Unique Character Subset — given a list of words, find a subset of words where no two words in the subset share any repeated letters, and the subset covers the largest possible total number of unique letters. AI coding 2: Kind of a mess. This round the interviewer opened by telling me he hadn't reali…

In progressOnsite0

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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