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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Chainlink LabsSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Recruiter Screen Goes Cagey Over Comp Questions

I'm based in Canada. I mass-applied online and a recruiter set up an intro call. The recruiter was late first, then asked a few questions: self-introduction, tech stack, why I'm looking for a job, the project I was most proud of in the past year, how I handle burnout, how I communicate with the team when remote, and whether I'm really into blockchain / have been following it closely. Maybe it was…

HR Screen0
DoorDashData Scientist
Feb 2026

Onsite ML System Design for the Home Feed Recommender

Problem background: design a store recommendation system similar to the app's home page. Interview process & core follow-ups: Overall architecture and hard constraints The scenario given right away was home page recommendation. User input is extremely sparse — basically just the User ID and current location. The system has a couple of hard constraints: the stores surfaced must be within delivery…

Onsite0
DoorDashData Scientist
Feb 2026

Three Onsite Case Rounds on A/B Testing and Promotions After an Easy Phone Screen

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OnsiteXP0
MicrosoftMachine Learning EngineerIntern
Feb 2026

Research Intern Video Screen That Was Pure LeetCode

Background: currently a student at CMU. Process: I applied online through a mass application, and about two weeks later I got an interview invitation. It was a video interview. What the interview was like: the interviewer was an MLE on the team who had been working for a few years. He was really nice and gave me quite a few hints along the way. Even though this was a research intern role, the int…

Technical Screen0
TuroData Scientist
Feb 2026

Solid Through ML and Coding, Tripped Up by Business and Stats

Sharing a rejection experience from Turo. The interview process itself was actually pretty good — I could tell that if I'd gotten in, I would have learned a lot. Unfortunately I still got rejected. Round 1 was an HR screen. It was mostly going through my resume, and based on what was on there they'd ask some ML-related questions, like what's the difference between XGBoost and LightGBM. Round 2 wa…

RejectedOnsite0
MicrosoftApplied ScientistSenior+
Feb 2026

Fumbled Diffusion, Wrong on Min-Heap, Rejected

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
RevolutData Analyst
Feb 2026

Recruiter Call, Then a Four-Question SQL Screen

The recruiter call was pretty standard — they asked why I wanted to apply to Revolut, my past experience, then talked about how they're now moving headquarters to the UAE, a lot of the roles are for continental Europe rather than the UK, it depends on how the interview goes, and they sponsor visas for senior and above, etc. SQL interview questions. The SQL was actually pretty hard — four question…

In progressTechnical Screen0
BloombergSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Coding Problems in One Technical Screen

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Technical ScreenXP0
RampSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Recursive URL-Fetching Round Under Time Pressure

They give you a URL, and you have to call it. The response might contain a new set of URLs, or it might contain other data; then you keep calling whichever URLs come back, recursing/iterating like this until you finally get back "congrats". You don't need to return the path, just the final URL. The problem itself isn't especially hard, but overall it's pretty tedious and practical. During the int…

Technical Screen0
SoFiSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Rounds, Rejected on the Second Attempt

This was my second time trying to get into SoFi. This time I interviewed with the Invest team. I thought the conversations went well, but I still got rejected. The market really is brutal right now. There were 4 rounds total: a phone screen plus three virtual onsite (VO) rounds. Phone screen: OOD principles, and implementing a multi-threaded task executor. I was given a class TaskExecutor that im…

RejectedOnsite0
PlaidSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Positive Feedback, Rejected for Background Mismatch

All the interviewers seemed pretty nice, but my impression was that they weren't that technically strong — didn't come across as too sharp. Phone screen: a coupon question and a new question I don't remember too well. They gave you a JSON mapping a bunch of routing numbers to bank names and had you process it — I forget exactly what the task was, but basically you just used various hashmaps to ch…

RejectedOnsite0
MathWorksSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

A Seven-Round Superday With a Presentation Deck and No Lunch Break

This year a lot of companies are on a hiring freeze. MathWorks is one of the few still hiring — I landed an offer for the SWE2 role. I got in through a referral. Recruiter call: matched with a team in Simulink product cloud infra. Just a simple introduction and some logistics questions. OA: debugging plus a coding problem. Breezed through it. Phone screen 1: self-intro plus the classic CS trivia…

OfferOnsite0
AristaSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Rejected After Solving Both Problems Optimally

There were two questions total: one palindrome string problem, one missing number problem. After I finished each one, they asked me for the time and space complexity. There were no resume questions, no other questions, not even a self-introduction. Overall the questions weren't hard. For the palindrome one, I considered the case where the string is "", but I didn't consider the case where it's di…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer, PhD InternIntern
Feb 2026

Two Back-to-Back Original Coding Rounds

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Technical ScreenXP0
DoorDashMachine Learning Engineer InternIntern
Feb 2026

LLM Research Questions, Then Ghosted

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No responseTechnical ScreenXP0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

Two Rounds on Video Retrieval and CLIP, Then Silence

I just finished two rounds of interviews this week, applying machine learning to design a short-video recommendation system. The first round covered how to design a query retrieval system, assuming only 20% of the short videos have text descriptions. They specifically asked how CLIP works, what loss functions are used in contrastive learning, what the drawbacks of embedding-based methods are, whe…

No responseTechnical Screen0
OptiverData Scientist
Feb 2026

A Three-Part OA With a Likelihood-Ranking Twist

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Online AssessmentXP0
DoorDashSoftware EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Rough Code Craft

Let me start with the technical screen: a fairly classic multi-source BFS problem — find the nearest source for every cell in a 2D grid. Medium difficulty, leaning toward the basic side. Next is the onsite, four rounds in total. Round 1 was system design. The first 15 minutes were spent talking about a recent project of yours, then it moved into the design question. The task was to design an app…

Onsite0
OpenAIData Scientist
Feb 2026

A LinkedIn Cold Ask, a Take-Home, and a Python Debug Stumble

I didn't expect to actually get an interview invite from OpenAI — I'd only asked a recruiter about it on LinkedIn. My own level isn't really there, so I went into it purely as an experience, but the experience was great, worth writing up a post-interview reflection. Some background: I do data work at a big company, and my job search has mainly focused on experimentation and causal inference. Afte…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleData Scientist
Feb 2026

A Next-Word Predictor Coding Question and a BQ Round

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OnsiteXP0

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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