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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NubankSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Chargeback Ingestion and a Database Read Bottleneck

Problem: Design a Chargeback Ingestion System Design a system that processes card chargeback/dispute transactions. The system receives chargeback-related transaction events, validates and deduplicates them, tracks their processing state, persists them, and eventually exports eligible transactions into CSV files. These CSV files must be sent to Mastercard via FTP/SFTP. The difficulty felt all righ…

RejectedOnsite0
AttentiveSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two Onsite Rounds and an Unexpected Catalog Design

I was contacted and invited to an onsite. Round 1 combined coding and system design. Round 2 included coding, system design, and behavioral questions. I felt that my system design and behavioral performance in Round 2 was poor, and I was ultimately rejected. There were not many interview reports about this company, so I summarized everything I could find. All the questions I received turned out t…

RejectedOnsite0
SchwabJava DeveloperSenior+
Sep 2026

A Final Onsite with No Break Between Interviews

After I talked with the recruiter, there was no phone interview. They scheduled the final onsite directly. I live locally and the office was not far from my current company, so I took half a day off and drove over for the interview. Interview schedule First, I spent 45 minutes talking with the hiring manager. It was mainly about understanding my background and answering behavioral questions. Next…

Onsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Messaging at 100 Million DAU and Gaps in My Design

The question was to design a simple text-messaging app, with a fairly clear scope: Only conversations between two people, no group chats. Text only, no images or videos. Web clients only, with no mobile push notifications to consider. 100 million DAU. Keep messages when the recipient is offline so they can be read after the recipient comes back online. The interviewer asked me to share my entire…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ElevenlabsSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Three-Question OA With a Surprise 2-Minute AI Follow-up

Fresh out of the oven. 3 questions, increasing in difficulty I guess, with time limits of 25 minutes, 30 minutes and 45 minutes respectively. Question 1: Next Number The next_number function should return the smallest integer which is superior to n and whose digits are all different from all of n's digits. For example, next_number(654321) return 700000. If no such integer exists, then the functio…

Online Assessment0
HarveySoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Patterns from Seventeen Reports

The author summarizes 17 Harvey interview reports from March through September 2026. Technical screens reportedly centered on spreadsheet formulas or text highlighting, with attention to dependency cycles, evaluation timing, and whole-word matching. Onsite coding examples included an in-memory filesystem, expression evaluation, citation highlighting, and duplicate-file discovery with symbolic-lin…

Onsite0
Mistral AISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

ML Fundamentals for a Research Role

The author reports an unsuccessful interview for a research-engineering role at Mistral. After an introduction to the team, the applicant spent several minutes discussing relevant background and projects. The interview then moved through direct questions about model parallelism, mixtures of experts, normalization, diffusion, optimization, preference-based training, and keeping GPUs supplied with…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
TeslaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A 15-Minute AI Recruiter Screen at 1.5x Speed

Recruiter round — they sent me an AI link, about 15 minutes. Going in, it was an AI with a really fast speaking speed, roughly like watching a normal video at 1.5x. This position wasn't really a match for my direction, so I answered kind of randomly. This position requires using Go, Java, Spark, Elasticsearch to build distributed systems — talk about your project experience with these How do you…

HR Screen0
PlaidSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two-Hour Screen Ends on a Syntax Error

I saw online that the first round is usually one hour, but I applied for a backend role and they required two hours back to back, with a 15-30 minute break in the middle. The first hour's question was a common pipeline question from the forum, and it went smoothly. After I finished, the interviewer was very insistent about how to test it, including wanting asserts in Python rather than print stat…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DatologyAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Three-Part Text Editor

DatologyAI is a startup that raised a Series A two years ago and still has not raised a Series B. I went into the interview completely unprepared. The problem was a text editor, and only when I was writing this report did I realize that it seemed to be a question the company asks often. There were three parts. Part 1: Implement adding characters and deleting characters, and print all characters.…

Technical Screen1
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Load Factor, Reachability, and Explaining the Approach

The coding question was the classic load factor problem and was essentially the standard version. At the beginning, I asked whether I could assume that every node was reachable. The interviewer said yes, so I implemented the solution under that assumption. When I finished, it passed three of the four tests. I then started adding an explicit reachability check. My main advice from this interview i…

Technical Screen0
AirwallexFrontend Engineer
Aug 2026

Two OAs, Then I Withdrew Over Red Flags

OA 1 Coding: create a task scheduler for asynchronous functions (event emitter) scheduler must execute tasks with the same name one after another multiple tasks with different names should execute concurrently and independently Follow up: cancel the currently running task by name and move on to the next one clear all running and scheduled tasks by name OA 2 System design: design an autocomplete s…

WithdrewTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Virtual Onsite with Top-K URLs Design, HTML Parser and LRU Cache

System design: Top-K trending URLs Design a system that surfaces the top K most-visited URLs over a time window. Clarify first: the window (last hour vs. last 24h), how fresh results need to be, exact vs. approximate counts, and read vs. write volume. Ingestion: click or visit events go to a stream (Kafka), partitioned by URL hash. Counting: stream processors keep per-URL counts in tumbling or sl…

Onsite0
DisneyData EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Six-Person Panel, Then the Role Was Put on Hold

There's very little Disney interview content on this forum, and the interview format depends entirely on the hiring manager for each team, so it's almost completely different from team to team. Just treat this as a rough reference. I interviewed with Disney's Experience division, which supposedly is a lot easier than the Streaming side. The title was Sr Data Engineer. Mid-August: applied through…

Onsite0
UberSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Tracking the Earliest Unrepeated Visitor

An Uber phone-screen report describes a data-structure exercise for recording ID visits and retrieving the earliest ID seen exactly once. The task includes a defined result when no eligible ID remains and permits keeping the data in memory, with IDs ranging to roughly one million. The follow-up asks how to make queries constant time. The reported hint involves removing repeated IDs from the front…

Technical Screen0
HeadlandsQuantitative ResearcherNew Grad
Aug 2026

An Amsterdam Dinner Led to a Fast OA, Then 40 Minutes on My Resume

I'm a rising senior at a UK undergrad program. Over the summer, I got invited to a dinner in Amsterdam by Headlands, which is how I first learned about the company. I applied for the Amsterdam QR New Grad role, and the process moved really fast: applied 7/26 -> OA 7/28 -> first round interview 9/8. OA: 18 questions. 10 multiple choice questions covering probability and statistics, hypothesis test…

No responseTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A New Coding Question, a Blank Editor, Never Reached Part 3, and Didn't Pass the Phone Screen

It seemed like a new question — I don't think the interviewer had interviewed with this one much before 😅, he wasn't very familiar with it either. Communication took quite a while, and sometimes the shadow and the interviewer disagreed with each other 😅 Part 1 gave a main() and a function header — you just had to implement the function. The interviewer initially said the output was an integer, bu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
NuroSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Scheduling Rounds and an Onsite Rejection

I had my Nuro onsite last week and received a rejection email yesterday. I'm sharing the experience to give something back to the forum. Phone: Coding: Essentially Course Schedule II, solved with topological sorting. The follow-up asked how to change the code for multiple threads. System design: A question that had appeared on the forum, though I hadn't seen it at the time. A video needs three pr…

RejectedOnsite0
NuroSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

In-Person Onsite and an MVCC Follow-Up

Phone Screen: Coding: Given point coordinates, points less than k apart needed to be merged into a group. I used union-find. The follow-up asked what to do if there were a lot of points and they were very sparse, and how to reduce the computation. System design: Design a metrics-aggregation system. Each vehicle collects data about obstacles on the road, such as locations. There weren't many vehic…

RejectedOnsite0
IBMSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

An 80-Minute OA with Tree Distances and Django Debugging

IBM's OA was unproctored. Here are a few pitfalls to watch out for: Q1: Tree Pythagorean Triples The problem: Given a tree and three fixed vertices x, y, z, count the vertices whose distances to those three vertices, sorted as a ≤ b ≤ c, form a Pythagorean triple: a² + b² = c², with all three distances positive integers. My approach: Run BFS or DFS once from each of x, y, z, record the distances…

Online Assessment0

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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