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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FigmaMachine Learning Engineer
Oct 2026

Agent Post-training Phone Screens and a Colab PyTorch Pipeline I Could Not Finish

Sharing my Figma MLE interview experience (Agent Post-training). A recruiter reached out to me in mid-September. The role is mainly about Agent-related post-training work, and I then scheduled a half-hour recruiter call. One: Recruiter screen (30 mins) The recruiter described the background of the role and what the work involves, then asked about my background and a few common BQs, including: Wal…

Technical Screen0
UnitySoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Hiring Manager Chat, Then Three VO Rounds

The first round was a hiring manager round. We just chatted about my resume and background. After that came 3 rounds of VO: System design round: Design a feature store that supports both offline ML training workflows and online low-latency serving. It must handle high-volume event data, give point-in-time correct retrieval for training, and serve features at low latency in production. Project dee…

Onsite0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

AI-Assisted Virtual Onsite Building a Query API over MCAP Driving Logs

This is the same as the earlier thread about this interview. The format is MCAP, and the content is car driving data, like video, images, location information... folder structure of the logs: MCAP defines a message schema, and the message content is ProtoBuf encoded. Every message has a timestamp, and the API I had to implement needs to query by timestamp, so an index is needed. My idea was to st…

RejectedOnsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Fresh OA with a Window-Sort Coding Question and an AI Debug Task

I just did the Amazon OA yesterday (10/9/2026). One coding question and one AI Debug. Coding question: Question 1 — Maximize Shipment Order You're working in Amazon's logistics optimization team, where shipments are processed in order before dispatch. You are given an integer windowSize and an array shipmentOrder of length n, which is a permutation containing each integer from 1 to n exactly once…

Online Assessment0
Candid HealthSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Phone Screen on Designing a Pub/Sub Signaling System

I recently interviewed with Candid Health, a healthcare insurance startup. I basically couldn't find any specific interview reports for this company on the forum. Afterwards I used Claude to dig through Glassdoor and found some related info. The question I actually got in the phone screen mostly matched what I had found. The question is roughly: implement a signaling system, which you can think o…

Technical Screen0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

45-Minute Phone Screen With Merge Segments

Old question: merge segments. You also have to think about how to handle slope 0. Solution: a math problem plus merge intervals. Now let me complain about this company's interview. The phone screen was 45 minutes in total: 5 min intro + 5 min Q&A, so that leaves 35 min for the problem, and you still have to communicate the whole time. 🙄 Even if I had seen it before and practiced in Java, I'd be d…

Technical Screen0
Retell AISoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

15-Minute Intro Call and a 6-Day Work Week

On 9/30 an external recruiter reached out to me about the Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Mandarin) position at Retell AI. We chatted for about 15 minutes, mostly confirming my background, language, location/work authorization, etc., and then they submitted me to the company. On 10/6 the Retell recruiter scheduled the formal intro call. The intro call was about 15-20 minutes. The recruiter spen…

In progressHR Screen1
NVIDIASoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three Onsite Rounds, Rejected Three Days Later

After I passed the one phone screen round, they told me to go straight to the onsite. There were only three rounds in total, which made me realize I wasn't going to be that lucky, and sure enough, three days after the interview I was told I was rejected. The first round was straight to a director: BQ plus a deep dive. He felt like a smiling tiger, rambling about this and that, and then suddenly s…

RejectedOnsite0
AlibabaSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Kafka Idempotency Grilling and a Silent HR

HR chatted with me first and explained the process: roughly three technical rounds, and at the end an HRBP round for behavioral questions. The first video round was coding. A few pleasantries, then 10 minutes of the standard memorized-theory questions, then coding: 146 and 460. They didn't make me run it. I passed, and they scheduled the other two video rounds, one with the technical lead and one…

No responseTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Java-Only CoderPad Screen With a Progressive Store-Hours Problem

I'm definitely done for after today's interview, no need to even think about it. I'm sharing my experience, and I'd also like everyone to help me critique it. The interviewer didn't introduce himself and there was no BQ. He just told me to open CoderPad and start writing a problem. The problem was progressive, and I could only use Java. It wasn't hard at all. There's a store, you're given an open…

Technical Screen0
RilletSoftware Engineer
Added Oct 2026

Senior Software Engineer

I had a pretty strange interview experience and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced something similar. The first round was described as a pair-programming / Test-Driven Development exercise. The task was very simple: take an amount, such as 1200, divide it across 12 months, and make sure the resulting values were correct. I followed the TDD approach from their preparation guide: wrote th…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

A 20-Minute HR Screen, Ten Questions, Late Recruiter Call

This is the HR screen right after the OA. I booked 1:30 PM in the afternoon and the HR was 15 minutes late straight away. In the end I sent an email saying I was free for the next hour and he could call me any time, and right after I hit send the HR's call came in. The whole thing took 20 minutes. What were the main questions in the HR screening? Background Question "Would you tell me a bit of ba…

HR Screen0
CrestaSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Five Timed OA Parts for the FDE Role

I applied for the Cresta Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) role, on the AI Agent side. I just finished the OA, and it is very different from the usual pure-algorithm OA. Overall it leans toward practical coding, understanding requirements, and real engineering ability. Sharing the question types for reference. The OA has 5 parts in total, each one timed separately, with these limits: 10 / 30 / 20 /…

Online Assessment0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

In-Person Onsite with a Design Round and a Train Schedule Question

The onsite was in-person (but virtual was an option) and only two rounds. I only had 4 interviews total with Google. Onsite was solutions design and Leetcode question. Solutions design question was design a review ingestion platform for an e-commerce site that takes reviews and summarizes them with an LLM for an internal dashboard. Focus on trust and safety, prompt injection, data sanitization, P…

Onsite0
J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Two-Question OA on Array Simulation and Greedy

The OA had two coding questions in total. Overall difficulty was Easy to Medium, mainly testing Array Simulation and Greedy. The specific questions: Dropped Requests (Array Simulation): you are given an integer array. A positive integer means adding that many server threads, and -1 means a request comes in. Each request uses up one thread, and if there is no thread available the request is droppe…

Online Assessment0
ImbueSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Rejection Email, Then a Hard Optional Take-home I Failed

Timeline Day 1: I applied. Day 2: I got a rejection email saying my background/skillset was not a close enough match for what they need. The same email also offered an optional take-home: if I passed it, I would go straight into the interview process and skip the first coding round. I filled out a Typeform (name and email), and within a day MarioHR sent me the assessment link. Format The platform…

RejectedTake-home Project0
Wells FargoData ScientistIntern
Oct 2026

Expected a Relaxed Research Chat, Got LLM and AI Agent Questions

I just finished my Wells Fargo interview. The role is Applied Computational Intelligence intern. Before the interview I saw on RedNote that it's just a chat about your research and very relaxed, so I let my guard down, prepared a bit around my resume and went in. It turned out they asked these questions: Behavioral question. I gave an example from my research, and they followed up three times on…

Technical Screen0
CostcoSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Rude Hiring Manager Cut Me Off and I Hung Up

Just finished my Costco interview. [Warning] If you're interviewing for the Costco e-commerce team, stay away from this team. The manager who interviewed me was disgusting, and I'd guess this team's reputation is probably already ruined by him. He started by introducing himself as the manager of some team and said this position was under him. Then it was my turn. I said I worked as a frontend eng…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Goldman SachsSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Two Phone Screens, Handwritten Onsite Code, Verbal Offer

A recruiter reached out to me and kept checking whether I minded being in the office 5 days a week (I told them several times that Amazon is 5 days too, so I'm hardly in a position to mind). First there was a 40 minute screening: write 2 SQL queries and fix a Java Spring API (I honestly could not figure out why the last two tests were failing). Camera on and screen recording the whole time. I loo…

OfferOnsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

A Compilation on Culture, Practical Coding, and Timelines

A clarification: this is a compilation, not my own interview experience. The content comes from public interview reports on this forum, Blind, Glassdoor, and Interviewing. It took me quite a long time to organize. Anyone who's interviewed there is welcome to add information or corrections. There's a forum compilation of 25 posts with a very complete question list, so I won't repeat the questions…

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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