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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Booking.comSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Priceline Canada Screen with AI and Java

One hour. It started with a conversation about my background and previous work experience, followed by AI-related questions: how I normally use AI tools, how I would design AI into a real workflow, how I would plan an AI workflow, and how to use and prompt an AI agent, including skills, hooks, and similar things. The coding portion used Java. The interviewer provided template code first. The firs…

Technical Screen0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Renamed LeetCode Problems in a 75-Minute OA

Both questions were renamed versions of existing LeetCode problems. Neither was particularly difficult overall; if you're quick with implementation and edge cases, you can finish within 30 minutes: Q1: Count Binary Substrings LeetCode problem: LC 696, Count Binary Substrings (Easy). Topics: Two pointers / counting adjacent runs, or run-length encoding. Approach: Count the lengths of consecutive r…

Online Assessment0
MetaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Six Weeks of E5 Preparation and an Equity Negotiation

Sharing my recent Meta E5 interview experience. Hope it helps people preparing. Background: Bay Area Backend / Distributed Systems About 7 years of experience Target level: E5 Senior Software Engineer Preparation time: About 6 weeks Overall impression: Meta E5 doesn't lean especially heavily on hard algorithms. It looks more at a senior engineer's overall ability: consistent coding, depth in syst…

OfferOnsite2
GoogleSoftware Engineer III
Added Aug 2026

Google SWE III Onsite Experience and Team Matching Timeline

I interviewed for a Google Software Engineer III position. The process included two virtual interviews followed by two onsite interviews. The first virtual round focused on Googliness and behavioral questions. I structured my answers using the STAR framework, and the recruiter later said the feedback was extremely positive. The second round was coding-focused and involved an array problem. I comp…

Onsite1
AppleMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Same-Day Rejection

The team is under iCloud and mainly works on time series and operations research optimization. The first round was a resume deep dive with the hiring manager. They asked how to decide which cloud storage tier to use for a user's files, such as AWS S3 versus AWS S3 Glacier, since different tiers have different costs. It was essentially a classification problem: predicting those files' access proba…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Jane StreetSoftware EngineerIntern
Aug 2026

Exchange Arbitrage and Quote Throughput

It was a low-level-design problem. Core problem: An Exchange Arbitrage System for stocks. Assume there are multiple exchanges, each with a market feed continuously publishing bid and ask prices for different instruments or stocks. Design and implement an arbitrage strategy. The example gave AAPL on exchange A a bid of \$1.00 and an ask of \$1.10, while exchange B had a bid of \$0.90 and an ask of…

Technical Screen0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Explaining an AI System and Solving a Maze with AI

This will most likely become a rejection story. At the beginning, I was asked to introduce an AI system I had designed and explain the problem it solved. I stumbled through the explanation, and the interviewer did not seem very satisfied. I probably did not make the project sound impressive enough. Next came AI coding. This really felt like a company going all in on AI, because everything involve…

Technical Screen0
AnthropicPerformance / Infrastructure Software EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Three Screens and an Onsite Invitation

The process up to my onsite invitation was as follows. Recruiter: passed, then waited two days. Hiring manager screen: passed, then waited two days. Technical coding phone screen: passed, then waited nine days. Onsite: scheduled. The recruiter round was very formal at the beginning. They really probed why I wanted Anthropic and why I wanted to switch jobs now. After the recruiter seemed satisfied…

In progressTechnical Screen0
IMCHardware Engineer
Aug 2026

Five Chicago Onsite Rounds and a Template Rejection

A recruiter first found me through a professional network and referred me to IMC. After two phone screenings with a hardware engineer and a machine-learning algorithm engineer, I was invited to the Chicago office for an onsite. The onsite had five rounds, all on the same day, and I met ten interviewers across those rounds. First round: Hardware architecture. I was first given a small program writ…

RejectedOnsite0
HarveySoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Hiring Manager Screen, Then a Spreadsheet Tech Screen I Didn't Finish

I applied online and a recruiter reached out. First round was a hiring manager screen. They asked questions like: tell me about a project I owned in the last year tell me about tough feedback I received tell me about a time I discovered an important problem outside of my immediate focus area Second round was the technical screen. It was similar to the spreadsheet question you can find online, but…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Power Day Across Two Days

I had read the Capital One interview reports on the forum and found them very helpful, so I'm sharing some more details to give something back. It was still the four-round Capital One interview, the so-called Power Day, split into case, behavioral, coding, and system design. I spread the interviews over two days. Day one, case interview: The familiar virtual-card-number problem from the forum, wi…

Onsite1
RedditMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

General Pooling and a Ranking Interview

I applied to a particular team while sending out lots of applications online. The first phone screen was a question from the forum: analyze a spent-hours dataset and predict clicks. Since I had prepared it, the interview went quite smoothly. A week after the interview, I still hadn't heard anything, so I logged into the candidate portal. The position I had applied for was gone, and the interview…

RejectedOnsite0
ByteDanceSoftware EngineerIntern
Aug 2026

Agent Metrics, Tool Debugging, and Graphs

The interviewer opened with, "Do you speak Chinese?" After I said yes, we spoke Chinese for the entire interview. I gave a brief introduction, then we went straight into questions. Fundamentals / business design Memory and virtual memory: Follow-up: What is virtual memory for? Follow-up: Can virtual memory space (VRAM) be larger than physical memory (RAM)? The reasoning we discussed: Yes. Virtual…

Technical Screen0
IBMSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

An 80-Minute HackerRank with a Slow Web IDE

The assessment lasted 80 minutes in total. At the beginning, it recommended choosing one of three frameworks: Django, Spring Boot, or Node. The first problem was LeetCode's Design Authentication Manager. The second problem provided a web application for a ticket-booking system. I had to fix errors in the backend. It involved basic concepts such as RESTful APIs, caching, and paginating returned da…

Online Assessment1
Jane StreetSoftware EngineerIntern
Aug 2026

Recursive Arithmetic with Invalid Intermediate Results

An algorithms/LeetCode-oriented question. Problem description: Given a string expression, evaluate it and output the arithmetic result. Restrictions and constraints: Only positive integers are supported. Intermediate-state validation: At any stage of the calculation, if a negative number appears (for example, an intermediate result below 0) or a non-integer appears (for example, division that pro…

Technical Screen0
PinduoduoSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

A Two-and-a-Half-Hour Second Round

The difficulty shot up in this second round, though that was mainly because my technical skills were weak. I felt like I'd failed. I saw a report from someone who also had a second round in July, probably with the same interviewer: a strong manager vibe, and basically the same behavioral questions. The embarrassing part is that I only read that report in full after my interview. Anyways. This rou…

Technical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Serious 20-Minute AI Safety HR Screen

A former colleague referred me earlier, and recently a recruiter called me for an HR screen. The recruiter did not smile at all and gave no introduction. The first thing I was asked was: why Anthropic? Then came several more questions: Was there anything in a recent Anthropic interview, article, or news story that I agreed or disagreed with? Why was AI safety important to me? Had I genuinely prac…

In progressHR Screen0
TradedeskSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Four-Level In-Memory Database Assessment

It was no longer the recipe problem, but there were still four levels, and the general idea and direction had not changed much. Level 1: Given a key, field, and value, write the value into the database and implement insert, delete, and update operations. This can be done with one nested map or two maps. Level 2: There were two search operations. The first search uses the key and field to list all…

In progressOnline Assessment0
AmazonFrontend EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Phone Screen, Virtual Onsite, and Bar Raiser

Amazon 2026 New Grad Timeline and Interview Experience Role: Frontend Engineer, or perhaps Full Stack Engineer. During the interview, the hiring manager said there could be an opportunity to move toward full-stack work within the team later. I just finished interviewing for an Amazon Frontend Engineer role this week. I wanted to share the full process, the interview content, and the resources I u…

In progressOnsite0
NuroSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Unprepared System Design Plus an Easy Coding Round

HR reached out and I just did the interview casually without much prep. The phone screen was 45 mins system design + 45 mins coding. System Design The question was to design a self driving car simulation job scheduler system. 10K simulation cases every week, each job has multiple phases, and the phases have dependencies on each other. Each case have several phases Weekly run of 10000 cases I hadn…

Technical Screen0

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.

Share your experience to earn XP