Interview Experiences

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

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AnthropicEngineering ManagerSenior+
Sep 2025

Cut in the Management Style Round

I interviewed for an L6-7 EM role, in the pretrain org. The technical rounds were: project retrospective system design There were 3 non-technical rounds: management style strategy and execution culture The project retro was the only round with an actual engineering leader from the relevant area sitting in, and I felt like that one went pretty positively — they asked some pretty sharp questions. T…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2025

Straight to Onsite, Rejected After One Weak Review

Referred by a friend on 4/7 for an early career role. Got an "aha" notification on 4/20, HR reached out on 5/1, and had the HR call on 5/13. No OA, no phone screen — straight to onsite. 3 coding rounds + 1 BQ round. I got lucky — all 3 coding interviewers turned out great. Round 1 was a trie problem. The problem statement wasn't very clear, and I got nervous while coding, so I forgot to store res…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Four Onsite Rounds from HashMap to OOD

Here's my interview experience: Round 1: A medium-difficulty string + hashmap question. I found the approach pretty much right away and had no trouble talking it through before I started coding. At the end there was a follow-up on how to make the code more production-ready. Round 2: An easy heap question. I basically figured out to use a heap and that solved it. The interviewer was pretty nice, a…

Onsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Loop Went Well, Then Rejected Over a Seniority Mismatch

LinkedIn HR reached out and said my background was a good fit; after an HR call, I moved into the interview process. The Phone Screen was an Easy coding question plus a follow-up — string matching. After passing the Phone Screen, I had a 30-minute informal chat with the Hiring Manager, mostly about the team's work and my own experience. After that, HR reached out to schedule the Loop Interview. T…

RejectedOnsite0
AirbnbSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2025

A Whiteboard OOD Round Where Even Checking the Docs Had to Be "Documented"

I interviewed with a specific team at Airbnb, and the experience was pretty bad. First I had a round with the hiring manager, which went well — we had a great conversation. The manager said the next round would be a phone screen: 30 minutes of resume deep dive and 30 minutes of coding. Before the phone screen, I spent time preparing some project talking points and BQ (behavioral questions). Phone…

Technical Screen0
UberMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2025

MLSD on Driver ETAs, Then a Coding Problem I'd Never Seen Before

The first round was MLSD, but it wasn't a traditional recommendation system or search problem — it was a design for real-time updates to the remaining ETA of every driver within a grid. You could only use the data they gave you, so the questions got very detailed, and any manual feature was challenged down to the last detail — I had to spell out exactly how every step would be implemented. GPS si…

Onsite0
eBaySoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Five Onsite Rounds and a CS102 Refresher

The onsite actually required 5 rounds... my vision went black for a second when I heard that, but since they'd already given me the opportunity, I figured I'd just go ahead and interview. The five rounds included: ML implementation: chatted about my background with the hiring manager, then did a case on how to handle cache update conflicts on the server. Design: yes, you read that right, another…

Onsite0
GoogleSite Reliability Engineer
Sep 2025

Coding, Networking, and a Distributed Rate Limiter

I interviewed for a Google SRE position a few days ago. The overall difficulty wasn't especially algorithm-heavy — it leaned more toward system design, real-world troubleshooting, and coding. Interview content Coding (LeetCode style) They asked a string-processing question: given a log file where each line is "timestamp, user, action," count the number of sessions per user. It was a variant of "g…

Onsite0
RobloxSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Digit-Grid Phone Screen, Then Resource Loader and Pub/Sub System Design Onsite

Engine-related role — all the questions were things I'd never seen anywhere on this forum before. Phone Screen: Phase 1 was an m*n grid where each cell holds a digit from 0-9. I had to collect every horizontal or vertical run of 3 or more matching digits and record each one in a results array, in the format [position, length], with the results ordered top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Phase 2 buil…

In progressOnsite0
Jane StreetSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Maximizing Reward as Pixels Reveal One Row at a Time

The interview was about solving an actual problem. The setup was an image classification problem using the FashionMNIST dataset. The model (a plain CNN) and the training code were already written, and the task was to modify it question by question from there; the environment they gave me was a Jupyter notebook (.ipynb). There were mainly two parts. After understanding the code (there wasn't much…

Technical Screen0
CerebrasSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2025

Three Whiteboard Coding Rounds on HackerRank

Last year I interviewed at this company and got the position, working on kernel implementation. They design their own chips, and I found their architecture really cool. I already had some experience with custom accelerator design. I applied for an entry-level position. I'd done some research in this area during college, which helped both with getting a referral and getting the company interested…

OfferOnsite0
FigmaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A System Design Interviewer Who Wouldn't Engage or Listen

First off, my overall interview experience with Figma was really good — the HR/recruiter was responsive and helpful throughout the whole process, and after the onsite they gave me detailed feedback. Every interviewer I got, except for the one I'm about to go into detail about, was pretty nice. This interviewer had me for the system design round, and the question was the classic "trending articles…

Onsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Coding a Reimbursement System With Group Limits

The interviewer said the question was the same as what's already on the forums — build an expense reimbursement system that can freely apply different approval rules to decide whether someone's submitted expense meets the requirements and can be paid out. I also got to the second part of the question: after you've built a reimbursement approval system, can you further group reimbursements by some…

Technical Screen0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Phone Screen, Then a Five-Part Onsite With a Brutal Experience Deep Dive

Phone screen: LC 1235 Onsite Coding: I prepared so much, and then they gave me a problem that wasn't from any of the interview-experience posts: Honestly the problem itself wasn't hard, but you had to handle the input/output strings yourself. I used Java, and with 45 minutes that also had to include small talk, I was pretty nervous, and it was just annoying. Code review: the interviewer was genui…

Onsite0
OptiverSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

HackerRank OA: News Subscription System Design

✅ Interview experience summary: News Subscription System design (hands-on HackerRank question) 📌 Problem background (system design) You're a news aggregation service. The goal is to give users one unified system for subscribing to all news providers, so they only receive content they're interested in without being overloaded with volume. The system needs to manage large data streams efficiently a…

Online Assessment0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Design a Hit Counter in a Key-Value Store

The interviewer emphasized that he wanted me to focus on analyzing my decisions and writing high quality code, etc. The question was: design a hit counter in a key-value store. But it wasn't stated that directly at first — the interviewer built up the requirements step by step. Design a key-value store -> asked me to think about the user experience I said I'd use generics, but in the middle I mad…

Technical Screen0
HarveySoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A File System Question and a Hard-to-Follow Interviewer

The file system question from 1point3acres. The writeup is here: a question that hasn't shown up on the forum before, basically a file system where you implement two functions: addFile(String path) — given a string like "path/to/somewhere/file.txt", store this file getFile(String path) — input "path/to/somewhere" returns file.text, input "path/to" returns the "somewhere" folder There wasn't reall…

Technical Screen0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Tree Sums, a Retry HOF, and a Rental Watchlist Design Question

The interview was on the easier side. The algorithm question was about a tree, where the leaves are numbers and each parent node's value equals the sum of its children. You need to be able to get the value of any given node. The second part adds a mutation: you can turn a node into a leaf, or take a leaf and attach a subtree to it, turning it into a parent node. Again, you need to be able to get…

Onsite0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

In-Memory Banking OA, Then a Surprise LLM Classifier Screen

After mass-applying online, HR reached out really fast — they basically sent the OA in the second week. The OA was pretty simple: design an in-memory banking system, four levels total. There's discussion of this question all over the forum. The first level was designing three functions: add account, pay, and deposit. The logic was simple — just define a dict to track accounts and balances. The se…

Technical Screen0
Jane StreetSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

OA Then a Phone Screen With Palindrome and Dice-Game Brain Teasers

I submitted my resume and got the OA email the next day. The problem was one that's already floating around the forum: using Excel to calculate a haircut, plus general Excel formula usage. Same numbers as the version posted on the forum, nothing changed. My suggestion if you're filling in the spreadsheet and need to use data from the problem's own table: use a reference, not copy-paste. The probl…

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.

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