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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PDT PartnersMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

Project Deep Dive, Then a Find-Divisors Follow-up

I interviewed with Citadel Securities (see my previous post) and PDT back to back. I originally wanted to post both back to back too, but something came up and I got delayed. The PDT team is different from the Citadel one. The link they sent was for a research engineer role, but both the headhunter and HR said it would be an LLM team, and it was hybrid 3 days a week, so I was really excited. But…

WithdrewTechnical Screen0
CitadelSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Maddeningly Vague Data Sampling Question

Citadel is out of their minds. The first half was fine — a normal self-introduction, project walkthrough, basic behavioral questions. Then the coding part started and that's where the craziness began: The interviewer was mumbling and couldn't speak clearly, and gave me a purely verbal problem: "we have millions of data points that need to be labeled," and told me to find the useful data. I kept f…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

L4 Phone Screen and Three Onsite Coding Rounds

Phone Interview Given a binary tree representing reporting relationships in a company, where each node represents an employee and its parent represents the employee's direct manager, write an algorithm to find the nearest common manager of a given set of multiple employees. This is a variant of Lowest Common Ancestor. There are K employees in the set and the tree height is H. Optimize the time co…

Onsite0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Perfect Cloud-Storage OA Score Followed by Rejection

I received the OA immediately after applying, got a perfect score, then received a rejection email a week later. The problem was a cloud storage system. It had four levels. You only got the next level after finishing and submitting the current one. Level 1: Support adding new files, retrieving files, and copying files. Level 2: Support finding files by matching prefixes and suffixes. Level 3: Sup…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
TikTokSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Two Completed Problems and Unexpected IDE Timeouts

Someone contacted me through a professional network, so I treated the interview as practice and a chance to see the market. The two questions were LeetCode 159 and 93. I stumbled a little on the problems, but I did write both solutions. Their Python coding IDE was very bad. It timed out several times, which made me think I had written an infinite loop, but the environment was actually just runnin…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Recruiter Screen About Level, Motivation, and Availability

The recruiter asked what level of position I was looking for. I was a little distracted at the beginning and misheard the question, thinking I was being asked about my current position at my company. The other questions were why I wanted to join Anthropic and when I would be available to begin interviewing. The rest of the call was an introduction to the interview process. I was told that a coord…

In progressHR Screen0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A News Aggregator Design Followed by a Fast Rejection

The system design phone screen used the news aggregator problem from the question bank, and all of the questions were standard. I had prepared this problem carefully, so I thought my answer went well. I also answered every follow-up, and the interviewer seemed satisfied with my responses. Even so, I received a rejection about ten minutes after the interview ended. The result and its timing left m…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

A Half-Hour Recruiter Screen on AI Safety

I received an outreach email from a recruiter in August. I originally thought we would just chat briefly and then move forward to schedule the later interviews, but we ended up talking for about half an hour. The recruiter asked quite a few questions, including: "Why Anthropic?" "How does your previous experience relate to AI safety?" "Why do you think you are a fit for this position?" "How large…

In progressHR Screen0
Retell AISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Coding a Stack Interpreter in Vim Without AI

A startup that works on voice AI. The first interview was handwritten Python. I used my own IDE and environment, and any AI or AI suggestion was prohibited. At the time, I did not know how to turn off AI inline suggestions in VS Code, so I had no choice but to write everything in Vim. Problem description The problem was to process a string containing numbers and operators. It included +, -, , /,…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SquarepointQuantitative Researcher
Aug 2026

Algorithms, Data Structures, Bash, and Dice

Short version: two algorithm questions, one data-structure question, one development-related question, and one statistics question. For an array of n positive integers arr[n] and an integer k, a subarray is good if it contains at least k distinct integers. Find the minimum length of a good subarray; otherwise return -1. Given a list containing an odd number of positive integers, you may remove ex…

Technical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three Phone Rounds, Three Virtual Onsite Rounds, Rejected

This was my first time interviewing for an Apple SDE role, and it was for compute infra. Overall the experience was bad: three phone rounds, then three virtual onsite rounds. Apple hires by team, and every team has its own interview style. My team did phone interviews one round at a time, and you only got the next round if you passed the previous one. Round 1: OS and networking fundamentals plus…

RejectedOnsite0
IBMSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

PostgreSQL Averages and HAVING for Resource Usage

Write a PostgreSQL query to identify customers whose websites have excessively high average resource usage. Table schemas: The customers table contains id (INT, primary key) and email (VARCHAR(255)). The site_metrics table contains customer_id (INT, foreign key), cpu_usage (DECIMAL(5,2)), memory_usage (DECIMAL(5,2)), and disk_usage (DECIMAL(5,2)). Specific requirements: The report must show custo…

Online Assessment0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

The Classic Elevator Question, Two System Design Rounds, and On to Team Matching

Phone: Classic elevator question. Q1: Given n elevators, all starting on floor 1. Then there's a sequence of calls; return which elevator the last call ends up assigned to. You can assume each call finishes before the next one starts. Follow-up: Given elevators with random starting positions, again a sequence of calls; return which elevator the last call is assigned to. This time, when each call…

In progressOnsite0
DRWSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

A Greedy Deletion Problem on a String of 1s and 2s

I got a string greedy problem: Given a string digits made up only of '1' and '2', which represents a positive integer. You can delete 0 or more characters from it, and after the deletion: the number of remaining '1's must be even; the number of remaining '2's must also be even; and, while satisfying those first two conditions, the final integer should be as large as possible. Note that you can on…

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InstacartSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

L5 Interviews in Canada and Team Matching

It took almost a month after I applied for HR to reach out. I had almost thought I'd been rejected. The OA was the vibe-coding OA that people have been talking about a lot on the forum lately. After doing it myself, I felt that ten minutes to communicate with the AI product manager was nowhere near enough, unless I used speech-to-text input. Onsite 1: Calculate Equation Expression. Onsite 2: A re…

In progressOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Rescheduled Telemetry Design Interview and Naming Variants

I'd spent a long time looking through interview reports and hadn't found anyone saying what the Data Infra system-design interview actually covered. I recently did it, so here's my experience. Getting this interview scheduled was rough. It was originally set for a Wednesday. On Tuesday evening, HR said my experience looked more data-related, so they'd have me do Data Infra system design instead o…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnapchatSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

LRU Cache and Thread Safety

Here is my Snap senior phone screen. It started immediately with behavioral questions. It looks like I still need to keep a few short stories ready in my regular preparation, since I have heard that the quality of the behavioral answers carries weight in the evaluation. The coding question was the classic LRU Cache problem. I had to be careful with the boundary cases while implementing it. The fo…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Reviewing and Improving Pull Requests with Claude Code

This new question had probably been in use for a few months. I was given an online VS Code environment and a site similar to GitHub. It contained four pull requests, and I was allowed to use Claude Code. The task had two parts. First, I needed to go through every pull request, explain the problem each one solved, and comment on each one. Second, I had to choose one pull request, improve it, and u…

Onsite0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

A 60-Minute Split Between ML and Coding

The phone call was divided into three time blocks. During the first 15 minutes, I gave my introduction and answered behavioral questions. The middle 15 minutes covered machine learning fundamentals. We discussed how to address overfitting, how to address class imbalance, the basics of optimizers, and model evaluation metrics together with their definitions. I was also asked to give a brief introd…

Technical Screen0
AmazonSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Binary Swaps and a Django Post Fix

I took the online assessment. It had two parts. DSA: minimum adjacent swaps for a binary array Given an array containing only 0s and 1s, rearrange it so that all 0s are at one end and all 1s are at the other. Either ordering was allowed: 000...111 or 111...000. In one move, I could swap two adjacent elements. I had to return the minimum number of moves required. For [0, 1, 0, 1], the answer was 1…

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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