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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SalesforceMember of Technical Staff
Aug 2026

Three Rounds from Streaming Top K to Payment Design

Round 1 Find the top K most frequent elements in an infinite data stream. Convert a sorted doubly linked list in place into a balanced binary search tree without creating any new nodes. Round 2 I had to implement merge sort by hand: Implement merge sort from scratch. Explain its recursion tree in detail. I also had to implement operations involving set bits and find all anagrams. Round 3: System…

Onsite0
RobloxSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Shared To-Do List Design and a Kafka Mistake

The system design question was the shared to-do list problem from the question bank. Unfortunately, I had not had time to prepare for it. This was also my first system design interview, so I did not perform very well. I made one critical mistake by adding a Kafka queue. That made the system asynchronous and would affect the speed of the synchronous flow. The interviewer still interacted with me t…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ArizeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three Threads Printing 0 Through n in Order

Sharing an interview from a less commonly discussed company. The problem was to have multiple threads print the numbers from 0 through n in alternating turns. Given a number n, three specified threads must cooperate to print every number from 0 through n in order. The output must also identify which thread printed each number. The thread responsibilities were: ZeroThread prints 0, and 0 can be pr…

Technical Screen0
The Trade DeskSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Take-Home Stock-Price API Task

I am not sure whether this take-home assessment is the same as an online assessment. Implement a single function that returns a list containing every date between first_date and last_date, together with the stock's opening and closing prices for each date. The rough interface was: The output looked roughly like this: All of this information had to be obtained through real HTTP requests. The promp…

Take-home Project0
Further AIMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

AI-Assisted Coding Round and a Four-Session Onsite

Further AI is a Series A startup that automates insurance underwriting. I interviewed for Staff Applied AI Engineer. The whole process was 3 rounds. Round 1: HM phone screen (15 minutes), mainly to see if there's a fit. We talked about projects I had done before, and they asked about my experience with and interest in using AI. Pretty relaxed overall. Round 2: Two 45-minute coding sessions. Merge…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Brand-New Rectangle Coding Question and a Grid System Design

I just finished my OpenAI interview and wanted to share today's experience. Unfortunately, the coding round gave me a brand new question I had never seen before. The topic was Rectangle. Roughly, you maintain a 2D board, and requirements get added step by step: add rectangle remove rectangle undo after that there were follow-ups like removeAt / batch remove The whole thing was multipart, adding o…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Feature Flag Design and an AI Coding Round, Rejected

I applied for the staff software engineer role. I'm not very strong, and I got rejected very cleanly. After the recruiter screen, they scheduled two rounds of a mini onsite (60 min * 2). The first round was system design. The question was to design a feature flag system, similar to Amazon WebLab. Because I hadn't prepared for it, and I had no systematic approach to open-ended questions, I got stu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MicrosoftSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Language Expectations and Stateful Naming

The author describes a Microsoft senior-engineering phone screen followed by three virtual-onsite rounds. The screen required a production-quality integer parser supporting arbitrary bases. The applicant advanced despite overlooking negative numbers. Subsequent sessions covered reconstructing digits from word representations, converting hexadecimal input to an IPv4 address, discussing a dictionar…

RejectedOnsite0
General MotorsSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Hiring Manager Chat Turned Technical, Then a Codility REST API Phone Screen

Earlier I had a call with the hiring manager. I expected the whole thing to be behavioral, but surprisingly it was almost entirely about technical decisions — things like how you'd go from a monolith to microservices, the tradeoffs between the two, and then how you'd go from microservices to a more modular architecture, and how to make those calls. About a week after that call, a recruiter reache…

Technical Screen0
DisneySoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Set Problem in Java, a Surprise Streaming Question, and a Reject

This was a practice interview at the start of my job search. They started off with a "most impactful project" question, and I just answered it off the cuff — I hadn't prepped for behavioral questions. Then: write a set, but at first they only let me use Java. I used to write Java, but algorithm interviews these days want you to write so much code that I've been prepping everything in Python. This…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
HeadlandsResearch Developer
Aug 2026

A Four-Part Online Assessment on Stats, OLS, and C++

I remember that when I applied two years ago, the question was still that C++ engineering problem — manually parsing an input string, handling timestamps, and running Kahn's Algorithm to compute a dependency graph. This time the OA was completely different, split into 4 parts. Since you had to keep your camera on, I couldn't take screenshots or photos, so everything below is from memory. 10 stati…

Online Assessment1
AmazonSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

AWS Offer After Four Onsite Rounds

Timeline: July 24: HR reached out on LinkedIn; I applied. July 31: OA. August 24: Survey. September 4: BOS onsite. September 10: Verbal offer. Four back-to-back onsite rounds. First round The interviewer asked two behavioral questions: one about doing something outside my area of responsibility, and one about helping a peer who was struggling. The coding question was similar to LeetCode 1152, but…

OfferOnsite0
RobloxSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

2027 Intern/New Grad OA Games and Coding

My Roblox OA from a month ago. Round 1: Cognitive Games, three mini-games Robots: Assemble tools to cross different terrain. Try different assemblies to reach the finish. Factory: Optimize the production-line network, identify bottleneck stations, and maximize cash flow on the high-profit lines. Mars: Outpost: Modular programming. Watch out: only functions packaged during the testing phase can be…

Online Assessment0
Epic SystemsSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

MIIS, Logic Puzzles, and Four Coding Tasks

Online Assessment Format Two minutes: Answer as many short logic/reasoning questions as possible. Twenty MIIS questions. Fifteen math/logic questions. Four programming questions. MIIS Questions MIIS arithmetic Calculate the value of 1 + 1 * 3 / 2 + 7. MIIS strings and type conversion Given A = "JOHN", B = "JANE", and C = "3DOES", find the value of 0.A + B + C - 3. Math / Logic Questions Coins Som…

Online Assessment0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Passing the SDE II Phone Screen After Leadership and Palindrome Questions

I interviewed for the Amazon SDE II position on August 29, 2026. The technical phone screen lasted about an hour. Interview Questions Behavioral: 3 behavioral questions The questions were primarily focused on Amazon Leadership Principles, especially Ownership and Dive Deep I would recommend preparing specific STAR-format examples from your past projects and being ready for follow-up questions. Co…

In progressTechnical Screen0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

An Unclear Car-Location API and Binary-Search Hints

This might have been a new question, though I'd only read about ten interview reports. I'd definitely never seen this one. I don't know the result yet, but I didn't finish, so I'm sure this is a rejection report. The main issue was some domain knowledge. I couldn't quickly step back from it, and wasted a lot of time. The interview guidance was also a bit off. I said, "Couldn't this use recursion?…

Technical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Leadership Principles and a Timestamp-Based LRU-Style Object

A female PM and an SDE interviewed me. They began with Leadership Principles questions: Tell me about a time when you needed to take responsibility or ownership. Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge. These were standard Leadership Principles questions. The follow-ups were about AI and impact: how many people used what I built, what my manager's reaction was, and related points. Then I…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

An L4 Loop Downleveled to L3

I recently interviewed for Google L4 R1 and R2. After the interviews, I was downleveled to L3. Round 1 Coding: Given a file system containing directories and files, where each file has a size and each directory contains files or another directory, calculate the total entity size for a given ID that may identify either a directory or a file. It was somewhat like a wrapped version of LeetCode 339.…

In progressOnsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Interviews with a Train Fare Calculator and Sliding Window Max

Interview #1 — LP + DSA/OOP Leadership Principles behavioral interview, about 10–15 minutes. Then the design question: a train fare calculation system. There is one train line, G → U → H → K → I, and the fare between every two adjacent stations is 1 (for example, G to I costs 4). Implement calculateFare(start, stop) to compute the fare between two stations. Think about OOP/LLD design: where does…

Onsite0
ConfluentSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Variadic Screen, Phrase Search and a Podcast Design Loop

I'm in Canada, interviewing for Senior I. Their old careers site has been shut down and you now have to apply through IBM, otherwise nobody pays any attention to you. It seems to be a transition period right now and the internal hiring pipeline is a bit of a mess. In two of my interviews, the interviewer didn't know they had to log into Teams, which threw things off. Screen: the classic isVariadi…

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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