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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RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

The Referral Chain Leaderboard Problem

Robinhood's referral program is pretty well known. The task is to build a dashboard to track the state of the referral program, specifically to understand how people refer others through a referral chain. Assume a person refers everyone below them in the chain. For example, A refers B, C, and D in a referral chain A -> B -> C -> D. Build a leaderboard showing the top 3 users with the most referre…

Onsite0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Full-Stack Phone Screen Lands an Onsite Invite

Sharing my full-stack phone screen — I applied for the San Francisco Hybrid position. The process was fast. One week after I submitted my resume, HR scheduled the phone screen. One round, 60 minutes: 40 minutes of live coding followed by 20 minutes of product discussion. The problem was to build a small listing booking widget: Input check-in and check-out dates, calculate the total price Select n…

In progressTechnical Screen0
WayfairSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Four-Round Virtual Onsite Rejection

Behavioral round: standard behavioral questions and conversation. Coding: simple coding with no algorithms involved. Calculate moving costs for different items based on their volume and category. The follow-up was how I would implement this in production. I talked about turning it into classes and then discussed object-oriented design. System design: design Shazam, a system that identifies a song…

RejectedOnsite0
AmazonSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2025

a Vague LockingTree Screen That Ran Long

I interviewed for L6 last Friday — I'm probably 80% sure I failed. It was with the Aurora team, and the interviewer ran the whole thing. The interview was scheduled for one hour, but I got tortured for an hour and a half. Right off the bat the guy spent about 10 minutes introducing himself, then had me talk about a time I both challenged and simplified a system — the scope needed to be big enough…

Technical Screen0
MetaData Scientist
Aug 2025

Ads Trade-off Questions in the Technical Screen

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

Technical ScreenXP0
AmazonApplied ScientistNew Grad
Aug 2025

Five Virtual Onsite Rounds, Mostly Behavioral, End in an L4 Offer

Background: I'm a non-CS PhD with a CS master's. Earlier this year, after there was a lot of negative news about my advisor, I switched advisors, gave up on academia, and started interviewing. Prep: since I had no internship experience and I'm not a CS PhD, my rule for myself was that I had to land an offer within at most two interviews, so I probably prepared more than I actually needed to. Roug…

OfferOnsite0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

A Four-Level Bank System OA, Time Crunch on Level 3

Bank System, an old question. Adding some details: Level 2 needs to output a string with the account info: {accountId}{amount paid out}. For level 3, both all-transfers and pending-transfers are better done with a map rather than a list, to save time. Level 1 is just creating an account, and adding to / withdrawing from the balance. Level 2: count the top N users by total amount transferred out —…

Online Assessment0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Three Onsite Rounds With a Bar Raiser and Nonstop BQ Challenges

Round 1 (possibly a bar raiser): The interviewer gave me 2 BQs and 2 coding questions. BQ1: tell me about your project... follow up... BQ2: don't remember. Coding1: given an int array where only one number appears an odd number of times, find and return that number. I used a hash table -> follow-up: how do you optimize the space complexity to O(1)? I got stuck on this one for a while, we went bac…

Onsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected Three Days Later

The phone screen was two months ago. The question then was [LeetCode] Koko Eating Bananas. I dragged it out for two months before I finally did the onsite. Four rounds. Round 1 was system design. The question was a three-day donation system. This round was 75 minutes long, but the interviewer and I ended up deep-diving into my project until the 45-minute mark before he even got into the design pa…

RejectedOnsite0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Passed the Phone Screen, Tripped Up by an Unusual System Programming Onsite Round

I got rejected. Overall the interviewers were all pretty nice, the whole process moved fast, and HR replied quickly too (feels like the grind-heavy companies all reply fast). It's just that they kept using the word "smart" — coworkers are all smart, they only hire smart people. I just wanted nice coworkers; "smart" doesn't really appeal to me at all, it actually made me feel some pressure. It fel…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

A Two-Day Virtual Onsite With Four Rounds

Outsourced recruiter call After the referral went through, I got emails to schedule both the recruiter call and the phone screen. This round was just going over my resume and checking whether there was overlap with the target team — the whole thing was 10+ minutes, but the questions were pretty targeted. Phone screen A senior manager. The problem was DashMart-style — I hadn't looked at any interv…

Onsite0
TikTokSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Three VO Rounds, Then Radio Silence After HR

A recruiter reached out to me in July for a team hiring push. I did three rounds of VO interviews, plus one round with a Talent Partner about salary expectations. Feedback on every earlier round came back fast, basically the next day, but ever since the HR call it's been almost a week with no word — feels like I've been shelved in the talent pool. I really don't want to give up, but there doesn't…

No responseHR Screen0
RunwayMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2025

Two Phone Screens, Rejected in ML System Design

Sharing an interview experience for a lesser-known company. It's a video generation startup that seems to be doing pretty well lately. I mass-applied to one position, but the recruiter contacted me about a different role instead. There were two phone screens total, both 45 minutes. Round 1 was coding: implement an ngram class with fit and generate methods. fit reads a file and counts ngrams, and…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

a Referral Bump, a Rushed KV Store Round, and a CI/CD System Design

This was for an infra engineer role on the data platform team. We chatted briefly, compared backgrounds, and it seemed like a good match. He then asked if I had any connections at OpenAI. I checked LinkedIn and found two former coworkers who worked there, so I gave him their names. I'm guessing he used them as references, because two days later I got an email moving me into the phone screen stage…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Interviewer Told Me Mid-Round I'd Failed the Parentheses DP Problem

Round 1: The input is a string made up of parentheses and numbers, something like "(( ))2 )1( )". Index: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Element: ( ( ) ) 2 ) 1 ( ) Say the index of a number is i — for example the number 2 is at index 4, and the number 1 is at index 6. For a given number, you have to pick: Exactly that many parentheses to remove. For the number 2, you pick two parentheses from before it and rem…

RejectedOnsite0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2025

Four Onsite Rounds, Rejected Over a Forgotten Import

Phone screen: break a log into message, timestamp, and level, then query it based on time. Easy-medium difficulty. Round 1 was a bar raiser — pure behavioral questions, around ten of them, all pretty common. Round 2, I don't really remember the specifics of the interviewer, but it was also easy-medium. Round 3 (this is the round I got rejected in): given an array of numbers and a number k, each o…

RejectedOnsite0
MetaApplied Scientist
Aug 2025

Sandbox Print Bug Sank the OA, Rejected Anyway

Got an OA, four questions, 90 minutes. It was a banking system. The first question was to write functions for generating accounts, depositing money, transferring money, and so on. The second question was to write a function that sorts all accounts by outgoing transaction volume, then based on an input n, outputs the top n accounts. For example if n=3, you had to output the top three accounts by o…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MetaData ScientistSenior+
Aug 2025

Strong on Stats and SQL, Rejected After a Moderate Product Round

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedOnsiteXP0
Aug 2025

Seven-Round Analog/RF Onsite, No Offer

This was at a major semiconductor company in the Bay Area. I submitted my resume and the hiring manager reached out to me pretty quickly, and we scheduled a 45-minute phone interview. It mainly covered RF system questions — things like the difference between homodyne and heterodyne, and some matching and noise questions. The second round was onsite, seven interviews total. The first person asked…

RejectedOnsite0
Jane StreetML Perf EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2025

A Two-Part Marketplace API Coding Question

A premium story — unlock it to read the full loop.

In progressTechnical ScreenPremium0

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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