Interview Experiences

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

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CitadelSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

OA Questions Matched a 1point3acres Compilation

I was tested on the last two of these. My solutions passed all the test cases. All of the questions below are from 1point3acres. Prefix Count of "10" Given a binary string sequence of length n, you can perform the following operation any number of times: append a '0' or '1' to the end of the sequence. After updating the sequence (i.e. appending characters to the end of the original sequence), if…

Online Assessment0
CloudKitchensSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

In-Memory Cloud Storage Coding Question

This was a bit different from the other report on this same file storage question. The first two parts were about the same: create a file, create a user. The third part was about adjusting capacity — when you reduce a user's capacity, you need to consider deleting the largest-size files. The fourth part was about compressing and decompressing a file. One thing to watch out for: Level 2's requirem…

Online Assessment0
Palo Alto NetworksSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Architecture Walkthrough Then Build on Top of It

Interview process Introduced ourselves to each other Asked about resume details A simple algorithm warm-up question System design based on the team's existing architecture Q&A for the interviewer Algorithm question: 226. Invert Binary Tree Wrote it on the whiteboard and did a dry run. System design This team is similar to an ML Infra team — the ML team provides a bunch of models, wraps them into…

Onsite0
ShopifyMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2025

HR Screen Cut Short Before the Hour Was Up

In summary, if you read through the interview experience posts here, you'll basically have most of the questions covered. The main thing is to sound natural in the moment — it feels like you need to get along well with the HR person during the chat. At the start, the HR person made small talk, chatting about the weekend. First question: why are you interested in Shopify. I tried to follow a templ…

HR Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Recruiter Gave a Last-Minute Ultimatum for the Only Onsite Slot

I still don't know why they gave me SDE1 despite having 1.5 years of experience. The recruiter was toxic — no response the day I reached out, and then the next morning, before I was even out of bed, they called me and said there was only one interview slot available, and if that didn't work for me they'd just reject me. So I basically got pushed into it with no time to prepare. I interviewed last…

Onsite0
BloombergData EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

SQL String Ops and a 20-Minute OOD Screen

The role was Senior Software Engineer - Data Engineering. I couldn't really find much interview experience for this role online, so let me contribute one here. The interviewer was a woman, not very enthusiastic. 40 minutes, 2 questions — the first was SQL, the second felt more like OOD. The first SQL question wasn't too hard logically, the hard part was that it tested string operations. I roughly…

Technical Screen0
TikTokSRE
Sep 2025

One-Hour Technical Screen Covering K8s, SLOs, and LeetCode 94

Interview process Overall it was a technical interview lasting about 1 hour The interviewer was pretty friendly, but the questions covered a wide range — felt like they were testing general SRE skills plus coding fundamentals Interview content Kubernetes Asked some basic K8s principles, like the difference between Pod and Deployment, and what a Service does. Also asked how to debug a Pod that fai…

Technical Screen0
UberSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

An OA With a Hand-Coded Tetris Fill Problem

I honestly don't remember the first two questions anymore, but they were both very easy, and it was explicitly stated that you didn't need to worry about complexity — brute force was totally fine. Even a rusty old-timer like me, who hasn't been grinding LeetCode for years, only spent 8 minutes total on those two combined. The third question was something I'd never seen before. It's similar to Tet…

Online Assessment0
InstacartSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Waiting on Team Match After the Exact Same Loop as Last Year

My virtual onsite (VO) was two weeks ago, and I got the result last week — I'm through, and now I'm waiting on team match. Coding round 1: two questions, both about shopper deliveries. The first one referenced something specific that doesn't translate cleanly from how I originally wrote it, so I can't say more about it here. The second one was a bit more involved, but if you'd already seen the fi…

In progressOnsite0
LambdaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Recruiter Screen Grills You on K8s, Bare Metal, and Fleet Management

Basically it's the company introduction, but they also do an initial screen within it — they ask you about some terms and questions, then write down your explanations for the hiring manager. They'll tell you they're using a Google Meet transcript for this; if you don't want that, the recruiter just listens to you and matches keywords instead. Some of what they asked about: Experience in Infra as…

HR Screen0
VisaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Warehouse-Capacity Routing and a Pair-Sum-With-Updates Problem

Questions one and two were pretty easy, I don't really remember them. Three: The prompt was long. You're given an int array representing the capacities of warehouses 0 through n - 1, plus an array of events. Events are either "PACKAGE" (process one package) or "CLOSURE X" (close warehouse N). Packages start being processed at warehouse 0, and once a warehouse hits capacity, the next warehouse tha…

Online Assessment0
NVIDIATechnical Marketing Engineer, AI Software
Sep 2025

First Onsite Round Covers ML Frameworks, Compilers, and Product Sense

Onsite interview 1/4. The first interviewer was 45 minutes, first asked about my resume, then an AI technical interview, since the role is technical marketing for AI Software. The interview was split into three parts. Part 1: Deep Learning Fundamentals Q1: In Machine Learning, what are the high-level trends happening at the framework level? I answered with the evolution from numpy to PyTorch to J…

Onsite0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

BQ Then a Tree Subsequence Coding Question

For the first round, there's a reference to check, but the post doesn't say what it points to. The second round started with a quick self-introduction and some small talk with the interviewer, then went straight into behavioral questions. We got asked: Talk about a time you taught yourself something — how did you learn it, and did it end up helping you in your actual work later on? Tell me about…

Technical Screen0
MetaData Engineer
Sep 2025

A Confusing Building-Capacity Coding Problem Plus SQL on the Library Schema

Python Questions 1 and 2 are basically the same as the ones posted yesterday. For question 1, I got a follow-up: how do you write it without heapq. For question 2, the log list's true/false values need to alternate, and you also have to consider that a book needs to be checked out before it can be returned — otherwise that's wrong too. Question 3 is a new one I'd never seen before and it's a bit…

Technical Screen0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Missing the One Case the Forum's Writeup Left Out

It's the courier question that's already up on the forum, and the forum write-up was already very detailed! But there's one thing it left out: the same dasher can take multiple orders at the same time. When I was practicing beforehand I hadn't considered that case, and I hadn't seen it mentioned on the forum either, so when the third, concurrent follow-up came out, I had to think about it for a b…

In progressTechnical Screen0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Trie Question, Five-Round Virtual Onsite, and an Unprofessional HR Twist

Phone screen (1 round): the interviewer ran the call (I remember his title was something like "senior engineer," though the way it was phrased sounded more like "elderly engineer"). He gave a trie + backtracking question. The prompt: the user types in a string prefix, and you return the 5 most similar existing words. You need to implement two APIs: a. add a word; b. search for a word. If fewer th…

OfferOnsite0
IntuitSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Phone Screen With an AI Prompting Round, Then Silence

Got a reach-out from HR two weeks ago and scheduled it. The phone screen was 45 minutes of algorithms + 30 minutes of AI conversation Q&A, all in one call. 45 min algorithms: One medium-difficulty problem One easy problem — basically detecting in a React environment whether user input is a valid palindrome 30 min AI: Mainly about whether you know how to use current gen AI tools and whether you ca…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Palo Alto NetworksSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

An Algorithm Question That Turned Into System Design

Interview Process Introduced ourselves to each other Asked about resume details (the interviewer was pretty funny — he saw on my resume that I mentioned how much revenue my project had contributed, and he actually asked whether the company had actually paid me that money) Algorithm question / system design Questions for the interviewer Algorithm Question / System Design This part was interesting.…

Onsite0
Scale AISoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Impatient Interviewer, Essay-Length Question

I'd looked at this company before and thought about applying, but I never really believed I'd pass an interview here, so I went in with a "just try it" mindset. The whole interview was really contradictory. You'd think a technical interview would be short and to the point, but the interviewer was very impatient the whole way through. He gave only a very brief, shallow rundown of himself and what…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, HM Chat Was the Roughest

System Design: Three-day donations. Specifically, you build a donation entry point for users, where the user submits their personal info plus how much money they want to donate to different organizations, and the problem gives you the assumption that you're only responsible for sending the money to the company's account. During the discussion the interviewer strongly suggested making it async, bu…

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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