Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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MicrosoftApplied ScientistSenior+
Aug 2026

Virtual Onsite, Then the Req Was Cancelled

This was a team under Microsoft MAI working on a web data platform, not the superintelligence team. The role was Principal Applied Scientist. The phone screen was mostly ML fundamentals and my background. They focused on data-related questions, and there were a few design questions too. Virtual onsite: What HR listed for each round did not quite match the actual interviews. Basically every round…

No responseOnsite0
CoupangSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Group Anagrams Twist and a Write-vs-Read Tradeoff Question

Team: Marketplace Growth, the US team (people in the group said the whole org is about 100 people — 50–60 in Korea, 30–40 in China, and only this one team in the US, around 10 people; the org head is based in the US). Process: one phone screen (57 min) → onsite, same team. Phone screen structure: ~35 min coding → ~13 min project Q&A → ~10 min reverse questions. Coding (HackerRank) Question: a var…

Technical Screen0
GatikMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

A Point Cloud Config Design Question, Not LeetCode

A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn first. I talked to the company's HR, and they told me the company currently has fewer than 500 people, builds mid-range self-driving trucks, and just closed a Series D round, so they're hiring more. Then I talked to the CTO. I mostly talked about what I'm currently working on, and my earlier PhD research direction matched what they do pretty well. Then th…

In progressTechnical Screen0
PalantirSoftware EngineerIntern
Aug 2026

Three-Part FDE OA Building a Grocery Coupon System, Watch the Rounding

I got the OA and worked through it in about an hour and a half. Nothing was especially hard, but watch out for rounding. I've organized everything and posted it all below. Part 1 — Initial Problem You're building a discount system for Trader Yojoe's, a growing grocery chain. Their business is thriving, but they're starting a new pilot program where shoppers can bring coupons and apply them to ite…

Online Assessment0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two of Four AI-Coding Tasks Completed

I just received a rejection. The feedback was reportedly that the AI-coding round had four tasks and I had only completed two. I'd like to ask everyone, especially people with experience inside LinkedIn: what exactly is expected in this kind of AI-coding interview? Was I led down the wrong path? First round: System design. Design a system to collect user activity, with queries for the last minute…

RejectedOnsite0
PerceptyxSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Project Deep Dive and a Next-Day Rejection

This round was mainly a project demo / project deep dive. The project could be something from work or something I had built myself. The main task was to explain what I had done, how I had designed and implemented it, what problems I had encountered, and the feature or product's impact and scale. The interview felt more like a conversation than a fixed set of questions. The interviewer kept follow…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
WaymoSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Simulation Design Round After a Recruiter Reassurance

Coding: 317. The second problem was traversing a graph with DFS, fairly simple. There was a follow-up: come up with an algorithm to prove your answer is correct. A strange follow-up. Behavioral: Very standard. A project I'm proud of, how to handle priorities, things like that. System design: This was the first round of the interview. What a disastrous start. I was interviewing with the simulation…

RejectedOnsite0
VercelSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Metrics Database in the Second Coding Round

This was my second coding interview, after passing the earlier coding round with the hiring manager. It was on CodeSignal. The code had to run, but there weren't any prewritten test cases that my code had to pass. That was pretty nice. It seemed that as long as it compiled, writing one or two simple tests with print statements was enough. The problem was to implement metricDB. A metric class had…

Onsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Grid Signals and a Blocker-Removal Follow-up

Given a grid representing a city, it contains the following kinds of entities: Sources (S): Emit signals. Blockers (B): Block signal propagation. Empty cells (.): Signals can pass through freely. Targets (T): Need to receive a signal. Signals start simultaneously from all sources. Each unit of time, they move one cell in each of four directions: up, down, left, and right. Signals cannot pass thro…

Onsite0
YelpData Scientist
Aug 2026

SQL, Python, and Experimentation

Overall, there were three parts: SQL, Python, and experimentation. SQL: the main focus They provide several table schemas. The first question starts with basic aggregation. You just need to use count(distinct ...) flexibly together with sensible filtering, so the key is to understand the table schemas carefully first. You can ask more questions. The second question generally tests a simple metric…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

UTC Deployment Windows and a 10-of-11 Assessment

Stripe's online assessment really required a huge amount of code, and the problem was both tedious and long. The problem gives a global UTC timeline covering the 10,080 minutes in one week, along with deployment rules defined in local time. The rules mark deployment as allowed or frozen and each has a corresponding time-zone offset. The task is to find and return the first K qualifying UTC deploy…

In progressOnline Assessment0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

AI-Assisted Logger Handler Screen on HackerRank

I used my own AI + IDE. The problem was on HackerRank and I shared my screen the whole time. I got the logger problem. Part 1 A logger has handlers. Each handler is independent. Handler types: Remove all occurrences of a configured string, then print. Truncate to N characters, then print. Uppercase the whole message, then print. Store the message in an internal array without printing. Discuss the…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Interviews Across Months and Unfinished Team Matching

I applied to Google quite a while ago, probably in March, and got an interview in May. The process dragged on for a long time. I kept practicing problems, and fortunately I eventually passed, but unfortunately team matching didn't work out. I've now gone to NVIDIA. The first round was online in May. It was a coding question, roughly like this (I asked AI to summarize it): Connected Crop Arrangeme…

In progressOnsite0
LinkedInMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

Weird Phone Screen with BQs, Array Sum Coding and InMail System Design

Sharing a pretty weird LinkedIn phone screen. A recruiter reached out in early September and set up a 20-minute call. We briefly talked about my background, the target role and salary, and then the phone screen got scheduled. Phone screen: 1 hour. It started with about 5 minutes of intro. I got interrupted before I even finished my self-introduction. Overall it felt like the interviewer wasn't ve…

In progressTechnical Screen0
MolocoMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

Ranking Design, Two Pointers, and ML Fundamentals

The phone screen was a conversation with the hiring manager that included a project deep dive and behavioral questions. The onsite included another project deep dive and a system design question related to ranking. The coding question used two pointers to find the longest consecutive run of 1s. The follow-up asked how to handle an especially long input across multiple machines. I was also asked a…

RejectedOnsite0
AddeparSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Table Transactions with Commit and Rollback

Coding / OOD + Data Structure The interview used a simplified table: I needed to implement: The inputs for the basic operations were simply the parameters in each method signature. showTable() printed the current table. There were no especially complicated return-value requirements. The table could be modified only after a transaction had begun. The transaction behavior was similar to a database:…

Technical Screen0
Akuna CapitalSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Hexadecimal AND and Binary Tree Recursion

This technical interview mainly covered C++ fundamentals, bitwise operations, binary-tree recursion, and dynamic memory management. The questions themselves were not difficult, but there was a strong focus on pointer use, boundary conditions, and low-level implementation details. Bitwise Operation Question: Calculate: Convert both hexadecimal values to binary: After applying the bitwise AND: Ther…

Technical Screen1
AtlassianSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Shortest Unique Substrings for UI Shortcuts

In a Web UI dropdown, users needed help quickly memorizing keyboard shortcuts. For every string in an input list, find its shortest unique substring and wrap that substring with the tags <u> and </u>. Implement a function that performs this transformation. The detailed requirements were: Uniqueness: The chosen substring must not appear anywhere as a substring of any other string in the input list…

Technical Screen0
AmazonData Engineer
Added Aug 2026

BQ Plus Two Coding Questions in a Referral VO

Last week's Amazon VO, done through a referral, was BQ plus two coding questions. First the BQ part: How do you handle it when you run into difficulties at work? When your team runs into difficulties, how do you encourage them and come up with a way to solve it? Why did you choose Amazon? Coding part: Coding 1: You're given a string array words. Each word can be written as the concatenation of th…

Technical Screen0
DeshawSystem Developer
Aug 2026

Linux Questions and Python File Parsing

The first interview mainly asked various Linux questions: what happens behind the scenes when I run ls in a shell, the differences between containers and virtual machines, and other knowledge questions like those. I wasn't asked to write code. After passing the first interview, I had a virtual onsite with three interviews. Beforehand, I asked the recruiter what each one would cover, but they abso…

RejectedOnsite0

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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