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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Apple
Dec 2025

A 45-Minute Technical Screen on Synchronizers and PPA

45 minutes total. It started with introducing the work on my resume — I talked about an IP block I designed myself. While I was talking he kept nodding, and I thought the first round was going pretty smoothly. Then he started asking some technical questions. Since I mentioned different synchronizers partway through, he asked why you'd use different synchronizers (2-stage FF, edge detect, async FI…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Dec 2025

Two Back-to-Back Rounds, BQ Then DP

This year's Early Career interview process has two rounds, and each round includes two interviews, usually scheduled back to back on the same day. If you do well in the first round, you get invited to the second round. Round 1 This includes a BQ (behavioral) interview and a Tech interview. The BQ interviewer clearly had a list of questions and just went down it in order — I'd answer one and they'…

Onsite0
SquarepointData Scientist
Dec 2025

Six-Question OA With Rotating Questions

Squarepoint's OA has 6 questions total. The first four are probability, statistics, and reading a piece of code to analyze its time complexity. The fourth question gives a scenario and asks which kind of bias in statistics the scenario describes. None of these are hard — you can finish them in 5-10 minutes or even faster. The last two questions are coding. The first one is easy: a store has n dif…

Online Assessment0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

A Timeout-Detection Question, Not the Usual Shortest-Path Problem

Looking at the recent interview reports on 1point3acres, they're mostly the shortest-path problem — I specifically prepared for that for a long time, but it turned out not to be that. It was an uncommon, old question. There were several event objects (sim id, type, timestamp) representing various events for a simulation's state. Type is one of start, ping, end. start means the sim starts, ping me…

Technical Screen0
Scale AISoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

Onsite Loop with a Cursor-Assisted CSV/GPT Coding Round

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OnsiteXP0
VerkadaSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

Two Coding Rounds, No System Design

Looking at other people's interview reports, most say they got one coding question and one system design question, but I got two coding questions — not sure if that's just because I was too slow and never got to the system design part... The first question: there's a camera that processes camera data. The input is a vector and a threshold. Each element in the vector is a timestamp and a motion le…

Technical Screen0
AmazonMachine Learning Engineer
Dec 2025

Onsite Loop for the Grand Challenge Health-AI Incubator

Grand Challenge is Amazon's internal incubator, similar to Google X — in fact it was founded in 2014 by Babak Parviz, the former Director of Google X. Right now it's mainly focused on applying AI to healthcare, and the project is highly confidential outside the team. That said, the interviewers and the hiring manager were warm and friendly, and the overall experience was positive. The interview h…

Onsite0
GoogleMachine Learning Engineer
Dec 2025

Rejected at the ML System Design Round

Sharing my rejection story — I just failed my Google Machine Learning Engineer interview at the last stage, so I'm writing it down while it's fresh, for anyone coming after me to avoid the same pitfalls. Process 5 rounds total: Phone screen (coding) Onsite coding, two rounds ML system design, one round Behavior/leadership, one round Process Review Phone Screen A LeetCode medium, a variant combini…

RejectedOnsite0
Morgan StanleyQuantitative Researcher
Dec 2025

Three VO Rounds from a Brainteaser to Black-Scholes Robustness

Virtual Onsite interview experience The VO had 3 rounds total, each about 30 minutes. Round 1 Mainly resume questions + probability questions + a brainteaser. The interviewer first asked some project-related questions based on my resume, then asked some probability questions. At the end there was a brainteaser: there's a dog running on a circle of radius 1, at speed 4. You're at some point inside…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Dec 2025

OA, Two Virtual Rounds, Onsite in NYC, Rejected in January

This is a much-delayed writeup. I applied in early November 2025, got the OA two days later, and finished it that same night — they told me I passed right away and scheduled R1. A week later they gave me the specific R1 time. Coding and BQ were both on the same day. R1 tech was basically the exact LeetCode 295 (Find Median from Data Stream, two heaps). After I finished, we did a dry run plus comp…

RejectedOnsite0
MetaData Scientist
Dec 2025

SQL and Product Sense on a Group Call Feature

The interviewer was a very energetic and friendly woman, and everything she asked me was about group calls. The premise: Messenger has groups, but no group call feature. The first SQL question was pretty common, but the second one I'd never seen before. What percentage of today's active "gb" users had more than 50 call records in the previous 7 days (counting both calls made and calls received)?…

Technical Screen0
PayPalData Scientist
Dec 2025

Two Brutal Phone Rounds on SQL, Python, and Airport Causal Inference

Overall impression: it was really hard. First there was a 15-minute recruiter call. They asked briefly about my current job, why I was looking, and my visa/status situation, then said they'd send an email with the interview process. The phone interviews were two rounds total, each 1 hour. Round 1: coding (including SQL and Python), plus a case study. The SQL question was built around drivers and…

Technical Screen0
Walmart LabsMachine Learning Engineer
Dec 2025

Skip-Level Manager Grilled Me on His Own Paper for 90 Minutes

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

Four Onsite Rounds Including an AI-Enabled Coding Test

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OfferOnsitePremium0
Goldman SachsSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

Two-Hour Online Assessment with Two Problems

2 hours to solve two problems: Transaction Segments Given an array transactionValues of length n, where transactionValues[i] is the transaction amount at time i. Count the number of contiguous subarrays that are strictly increasing and have length exactly k. Strictly increasing means: transactionValues[i] < transactionValues[i+1] < ... < transactionValues[i+k-1], i.e., every element must be stric…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

A Five-Part OA Simulating a Connection Load Balancer

This was a connection management simulation question for a Jupyter Server — essentially implementing a simplified connection router / load balancer that manages connection state across multiple backend target servers based on different request types (CONNECT, DISCONNECT, SHUTDOWN, etc.). It's not a big system design question. It's more of a small-scale system design / stateful system simulation —…

Online Assessment0
MetaData Scientist
Dec 2025

Onsite Loop With a Repeated Question and a Pushy Follow-Up Round

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WaymoMachine Learning EngineerIntern
Dec 2025

K-Means++ Miss and a Trajectory Prediction Question

First round: We just chatted casually at the start — they asked about the project I'd worked on, how big the network was, how many parameters, how big the data was, that kind of thing. I couldn't really remember most of it. Then we moved on to coding k-means. I had to explain what k-means is first, and after I finished writing it, they asked me to write a better initialization method. They gave m…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Dec 2025

OA: Token-Hopping Coin Board and Shared-Digit Grouping

Two questions, 90 minutes, not hard. First question: given a string representing the board of a single-player game laid out horizontally, containing three possible values: '.', 'T', 'C'. '.' means the position is empty, 'C' means there's a coin at that position, and 'T' means the player's token is at that position. The board length is at most 100. The player has multiple tokens, and the movement…

Online Assessment0
OptiverSoftware EngineerIntern
Dec 2025

Passed the Superday, Rejected in the Final Behavioral Round

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RejectedOnsiteXP0

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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