Interview Experiences

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

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SalesforceSoftware Engineer II
Sep 2025

Recruiter Forgot About Me, Then a No-Coding Cloud Round

In April, a recruiter reached out and scheduled a video call to get a sense of my situation. They mentioned there would be a lot of openings coming after that. In June I noticed a large number of Salesforce job postings, but the recruiter had forgotten about me, so I emailed to nudge them. I was interviewing for SDE 2. Round 1: hiring manager screening. Mostly asked about my background and why I…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Virtual Onsite with BQ, an OO Ticket System, and a Recommendation Engine

This was a virtual onsite. The interviewer told me right away that he'd be taking a lot of notes, so I shouldn't read too much into it. BQ section: The first question was on "Ownership" — he asked if I'd ever run into something that wasn't technically part of my responsibilities but I went ahead and took care of it anyway. The second was "Deliver Results" — he asked for an example of delivering s…

Onsite0
TikTokSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Passed Round 1 Coding I Couldn't Solve, Rejected After Round 2

The first round was with a peer based in North America. They opened with some common project questions — what was the hardest part, and how I solved it. Then there was a coding question, a variant of a LeetCode problem. They gave a string and a width. The first part was to split the whole string into lines of that width, then add a suffix to each line saying which line number it is out of the tot…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
UberSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

a Candy-Crush Matrix and a Fruit-Pair Sliding Window on the OA

Questions 1 and 2 were easy, two array questions. Question 3 was kind of like a match-three game — a matrix where different numbers represent different colors. If a cell has two neighbors (up, down, left, or right) that are the same color as it, they explode and get cleared. After the whole matrix finishes clearing, the cells that weren't cleared fall down. Empty cells are represented by 0. Retur…

Online Assessment0
BloombergSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Two Rough Phone Screens and a Cryptic Tree Puzzle

The interview experience itself was actually pretty good in one sense — just spray and pray, blindly mass-applying with your eyes closed, and there's a decent chance you'll land some phone screens. I landed four HR calls total: one slot already got filled, another is still waiting to be scheduled, so right now I've actually done two phone screens. But honestly, the experience itself was not great…

No responseTechnical Screen0
UberSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Meeting Scheduler Follow-ups, Paxos/Raft BQ, and a Driver HeatMap System Design

Technical Screen: The interviewer tested an algorithm problem (the name was written in an obscured/garbled way in the original post), with a follow-up asking for a simple multithreading variation. Virtual Onsite: Algorithm round: one of the interviewers tested something pretty similar to the earlier problem, with a follow-up about not passing time in as an argument. BQ round, with the hiring mana…

OfferOnsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Poker System Design, OOD Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Two Hiring Manager Rounds

Coding 1 Design a poker card system, implementing two core methods: shuffle and order. The order method needs to return a sorted list of cards by suit and rank — for example starting with 3 of Clubs, 3 of Diamonds, 3 of Hearts, 3 of Spades, and so on up through Ace. Coding 2 First a relatively simple LeetCode DFS (depth-first search) question, followed by an OOD (object-oriented design) segment w…

Onsite0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

an OA with almost no test cases given

Just finished the SWE OA, same setup as the reports people have posted in past years. Overall it wasn't that hard — compared to some other trading companies it wasn't especially hard, but the OA email did say you need to write your own test cases, and that turned out to be true. They give very, very few test cases, and there are a lot of edge cases you have to figure out and test yourself. On one…

Online Assessment0
AdobeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four Rounds on the AEP Team, Recruiter Wanted More System Design Experience

This was for the AEP team — a pit that a friend referred me into. Four rounds total, overall not too hard. Round 1 was billed as tech/coding, but after we finished going over my resume, the interviewer just started asking about request latency analysis, plus some front-end/back-end fundamentals-style questions. I initially expected coding or system design, but it ended up basically being a conver…

Onsite0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

A Surprise Extra Round, Then a Downlevel to Senior

Overall the problems weren't hard, but there was a lot of code to write. The phone screen was one round of coding — they asked the file deduplication problem (Q2), done on Replit. The onsite (VO) had 5 rounds total — it was originally supposed to be 4, but they added one more afterward: Round 1, Coding: asked the web crawler question (Q1). The interviewer asked if I'd seen a similar problem befor…

OfferOnsite0
MetaMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2025

GenAI Reorg Chaos Mid-Loop

The whole interview experience was pretty bizarre, moving at the same pace as Zuckerberg's MSL reorg. At the start, it was the GenAI department interviewing me, matched to one specific team. Then they just couldn't get an interview scheduled — it dragged on for over a month. By the time the interview finally got scheduled, GenAI had already been carved out to Alex Wang, so this was one of the mos…

Onsite0
OpenAIMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2025

A Rate-Limited Dependency Version Search Problem

First question: the topic was dependency version check. Part 1: they give you a list of dependency versions, for example [103.003.02, 103.003.03, 203.003.02]. Each version may or may not support the current feature, and you need to find the earliest version that supports it. Part 2: they gave a bunch of corner test cases, and some of the cases actually expose more requirements — your earlier assu…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Quota System Design That Ran Out of Time

Interview process Both sides introduced ourselves. The interviewer asked about one of my projects — I don't quite remember what exactly they asked. Then system design. Then I asked the interviewer some questions. System design Question: design a Quota System that's shared by multiple upstream services. For example, Google Drive and Google Photos share 100GB of space, and each user has one global…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AirbnbSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

A Whiteboard OOD Screen With a Difficult Interviewer

I did a team-match interview with a team at Airbnb, and the experience was pretty bad. First I had a round with the manager, and that went really well — we talked and it was a pleasant conversation. Then the manager said the next round would be a phone screen: 30 minutes for a resume deep dive and 30 minutes for coding. Before the phone screen I spent time prepping some project talking points and…

Technical Screen0
MetaData Engineer
Sep 2025

Onsite Loop: Product Sense, Data Modeling, Python, SQL

Product Sense (10 minutes) Try to keep your answers fairly brief. Prepare 4-6 main metrics and you don't need to explain in much detail why you picked each one, unless you feel the interviewer wants to hear more or they ask directly. Every interviewer's expectations are a little different, but overall I felt they don't dig in that deep, so don't spend too much time preparing for this part. The qu…

Onsite0
AmazonFront End EngineerIntern
Sep 2025

Two Rounds and a Verbal Offer Tied to Internship Length

OA outcome: I solved both algorithm questions (passed all the test cases). For the behavioral part after that, I just went with my own gut feeling — the work simulation section was mostly about logic, and I hadn't looked at Amazon's Leadership Principles beforehand. Interview experience: The interview experience was really good — the interviewer was warm and respectful, and gave a lot of hints an…

OfferTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

Passed Five Rounds but Lost to an Internal Hire, Plus Coupang, Databricks, and Mistral AI Along the Way

Background: 5.5 years of experience, all of it at second-tier companies doing infra. Goal: mainly looking to move into AI-related work. Target level is Google L5 equivalent or above. I'm not afraid of a heavy workload, I like healthy competition. Timeline: started grinding problems and sending out resumes from early February, and by early June had gradually started getting offers and wrapped up i…

RejectedOnsite0
BloombergSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Three Onsite Rounds in One Day

This week's onsite report — all three rounds happened on the same day, and I probably failed. In the third round, the manager didn't ask me anything at all, he just told me straight up to ask him any questions I had. I stayed calm and asked a few things, it took about half an hour, then he said I could ask one last question and that was it. Round 1: coding Round 2: SD, with the team lead Round 3:…

In progressOnsite0
Credit GenieSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

FastAPI CRUD Pairing, Rejected Over a Communication Slip

When I was preparing, I couldn't find this question on the forum — it's a startup, so that's understandable. Here's the overall process: Hiring Manager Interview Technical Pairing, Python AI/ML Technical Pairing Systems Architecture & Design (AI/ML) Motivation + Mission Alignment Executive Interview I got cut after the first round, which combined the Technical Pairing and the Hiring Manager Inter…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Web Crawler Question That Turned Into a Late Multithreading Push

Phone screen, and there's a problem on LeetCode that's almost identical to what they asked. Write a web crawler that only scrapes pages under the same hostname. The URL they gave me was for a real website (I think it might have been their CEO's blog?). The interview format was a bit different though — he didn't have me jump straight to writing multi-threaded code. You do it single-threaded first,…

RejectedTechnical 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.

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