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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DatabricksSolutions Architect
Jul 2025

Behavioral, Technical Screen, and a Week-Long CodeSignal Assessment

A while back, a recruiter from Databricks reached out about a Solutions Architect position. Since it had some relevance to my background, I figured I'd interview for it and give it a shot, so I wanted to share my fresh-off-the-press interview notes with everyone — hope this helps. The first round was a behavioral interview with the hiring manager, mainly talking about my past experience along wit…

Take-home Project0
Jane StreetData ScientistIntern
Jul 2025

A Coin-Flip Probability Puzzle and a Cyclic Game-Theory Question

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Technical ScreenPremium0
BloombergProduct Manager
Jul 2025

Efficient Process, Rejected the Next Day

Fresh rejection from Bloomberg. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn. They quickly scheduled the first round, an HR sync, about 30 minutes. They asked about my general work experience, whether I owned the roadmap, whether I had experience launching products globally, how I worked with cross-functional teams, and what the product I owned was like. They walked me through the overall interview proces…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SunriseSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

Nine or Ten Rounds in One Chicago Onsite

You have to go to Chicago in person — I'm sick of it. The whole trip was a terrible experience. The interview process was long and painful, and after each round they'd ghost you for a month. But then when HR finally reached back out a month later, you had to give them a firm availability within a single day. The company's culture and technical bar didn't impress me either. They seem to have very…

Onsite0
NordstromFull-Stack Software Engineer (SDE II)
Jul 2025

Referral to Four Onsites, Bombed the Frontend Round

I got into this team's interview process through a friend's referral. The team was hiring a Full-Stack Engineer (SDE II). It ended up being one HR call, one phone screen, and four onsite rounds. Besides the usual "why are you switching jobs" and "why Nordstrom" questions, what was different from other companies was that they directly asked about my salary expectations and gave me the package righ…

Onsite0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

an LRU-Based Event Scheduler Screen

HR reached out to me on LinkedIn, and we scheduled a round right away. Not a tag question. Say you have a job scheduler that processes events. The input is a timeout value and a stream of events, and you need to figure out which events time out. Events come in three modes: start, end, and ping. A ping updates an event's status, and if the time between an event's last update and the current time e…

Technical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2025

Four-Round Virtual Onsite With an Incident Simulation

Virtual Onsite, four rounds total. First round simulated handling an Incident. Second round System Design, third round Coding, fourth round HM (Hiring Manager). Incident Assume we own a payment integration service. Internally, various services call us to make payments, and downstream from us is a financial institute. The current incident shows our service is abnormal, with high CPU and memory usa…

RejectedOnsite0
TikTokProduct ManagerIntern
Jul 2025

Four Rounds, Manager Round Was the Toughest

Getting through all 4 rounds of the intern interview process was genuinely not easy. After I finished, I felt like my English and my structured way of speaking had leveled up dramatically. I got the interview invite from HR on LinkedIn. After we scheduled a call, they walked me through the role details and the interview process. Round 1: Full self-introduction in English. For the questions after…

OfferOnsite0
CitadelSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

Two OA Problems I Couldn't Solve Optimally

I wrote up my Citadel interview experience around this time last year too, and it was pretty easy back then. This time I got the OA invite and just went ahead and did it, and I ended up not finding the optimal solution for either problem, haha. If anyone has ideas, let's discuss. Problem 1 Given an array arr of n integers, for a triplet of 1-based indices i[1], i[2], i[3] (1 ≤ i[1] ≤ i[2] ≤ i[3]…

Online Assessment0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

Bar Raiser Behavioral Marathon, a Parking Lot OOD, and Route-Planning Coding

Round 1: it went straight into bar raiser mode, five BQs back to back for the whole round, totally overwhelmed me. The ones I roughly remember: most interesting/proud project, dealing with ambiguity, conflict/different opinions, how to make your work more efficient (something like that? I used "prioritize things"), and the most challenging thing you've dealt with. Tons of follow-ups, and the inte…

Onsite0
LinkedInMachine Learning Engineer
Jul 2025

Onsite Undone by a Key-Value Store System Design Question

LinkedIn, AI track. I passed the technical screen before the layoffs, and it didn't get scheduled for onsite until this week. The hiring manager round is scheduled for before National Day — nothing much to say about that yet. After preparing for so long I was actually pretty confident, but today one of the system design rounds completely wrecked me. I'm not fully willing to accept that, but I'm s…

In progressOnsite0
SoFiSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

Positive Feedback, Then Strung Along

Let me start with the outcome: I interviewed at SoFi in June, and everything from the phone screen to the onsite moved very fast. In the end the recruiter even said it was positive — and then they started stringing me along. The onsite had 3 rounds: React: write a standard CRUD table System Design: design a suggestion system The HM round covered my past experience, debugging, and a random API des…

WithdrewOnsite0
GoogleSite Reliability Engineer
Jul 2025

Interviewer's Test Cases Contradicted Each Other

I had a phone interview today for a Google SRE position — a DSA round. It was a question I'd already done before (an original LeetCode problem), but I'm guessing the interviewer is still going to fail me. Everyone should learn this technique for failing candidates: give a ton of test cases — looked like 8 of them. At first, since it was the original problem, I started explaining to him how to sol…

In progressTechnical Screen0
KlaviyoSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

No-Camera OA, Passed 3 of 4 on a Banking System Design Problem

No need to turn the camera on. Out of four questions, all subtasks passed on three of them. I was just using it as practice — I didn't use AI, wrote all three questions myself. Level 1 and 2 were fairly simple. Design Banking System Level 3: Schedule Payments transfer(timestamp, source_account_id, target_account_id, amount) -> str|None At timestamp, deduct amount from source_account_id and freeze…

Online Assessment0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

Four-Round Onsite, Rejected After a System Design Round I Hadn't Prepped For

March 26: first round, the screen. Two medium questions — one I'd never seen before, and the other was a variant of vertical order traversal. I'd actually only grinded 32 problems total, and somehow I passed. Still feels like a miracle. Onsite was on the 2nd. Let me update on that too. Four rounds total, as follows: System design. The interviewer was very nice, and the topic happened to be a syst…

RejectedOnsite0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Jul 2025

OA, System Design, Debug, and Craft Rounds

OA: Not LeetCode. You're given an actual scenario and you live-code a Service class on HackerRank right there — the logic is fairly simple, basically a bunch of if-else checks just to see whether your logic is clear, not really algorithm-based at all. But there were three parts. My advice: once you've nailed down the requirements, write fast, otherwise you definitely won't have time left to write…

Onsite0
MetaData Engineer
Jul 2025

Four Onsite Rounds in One Day

Four rounds total, all held on the same day, with a lunch break in between: Round 1: ETL technical Round 2: Data modeling Round 3: ETL technical (leaning more toward real-time processing) Round 4: Behavioral + ownership-related HR calls ahead of time to explain what each round covers, so the overall schedule is pretty clear. The first two rounds lean toward data modeling and traditional batch pro…

Onsite0
TikTokData Scientist
Jul 2025

A Hiring Manager Round Built Around One Experimentation Case

Round 1: HR screen, pretty much a normal phone screen — confirmed my work experience and visa status. Round 2: Hiring manager. This round had no coding (not sure if that counts as weird...). First 25 minutes: deep dive into my resume, lots of "why" questions about my project experience. Last 25 minutes, the case was: They want to launch an experiment testing a new version of a recommendation algo…

Technical Screen0
NuroData Scientist
Jul 2025

Merging Overlapping Vehicle-Run Intervals in SQL and Python

Dataset description The dataset had several fields: set id, run id, start time, end time, and set number. The set ids ran from 1 to 6 and represented different recorded segments from autonomous-vehicle sessions. For example, set 1 was about 30 seconds long, set 2 was 23 seconds, set 3 was 19 seconds, and so on. The run id identified the trip. It used a time-string format such as 20250101_122334,…

Technical Screen0
LinkedInData Scientist
Jul 2025

Statistics and Case-Study Questions from the Screening Round

I can't guarantee these answers are 100% correct — take them as reference only! LinkedIn Stats One bank has 5 tellers and a single line; another bank has 5 tellers but 5 separate lines. Which one would you stand in? Simple statistical explanation: the "long plank effect" (the opposite of the weakest-link effect). In a single queue, your waiting time is determined by the fastest available teller.…

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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