Interview Experiences

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

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4433 stories

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ByteDanceSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Backend Fundamentals, Databases, and One DFS Problem

First round: technical interview. The interviewer was based in China. The interview leaned toward backend fundamentals, databases, middleware, and web protocols, followed by one algorithm problem. Deep dive into resume projects The interviewer asked about past projects on my resume, focusing on project architecture, the reasons for technical choices, and implementation details from the business l…

Technical Screen0
CitadelSoftware EngineerIntern
Aug 2026

A Course Schedule Variant That Didn't Quite Run

This was for a 2027 summer internship, interviewing in the summer before my junior year. The first 15 minutes were self-introduction plus resume questions. The resume question was pretty vague — the interviewer only asked one question, but it actually bundled two things together: my most technically challenging experience, and whether I had a feature that directly helped with product commercializ…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three-Part OA on Data Center Routing

Online Assessment Part 1: Data Center Registration and Health State Management Need to implement the following two commands: REGISTER <region> <latitude> <longitude> <capacity>: registers a data center, with a default health state of healthy. SET_HEALTHZ <region> <state>: sets the health state of a given data center (true for healthy, false for unhealthy). Validation rules: Latitude must be in th…

Online Assessment0
NuroSoftware EngineerIntern
Aug 2026

Minesweeper and a Non-Thread-Safe Video Player in One 90-Minute Round

We interviewed together on: Coding Algorithm + Coding System, 1 hour 30 minutes total. Coding Algorithm: a Minesweeper problem. The interviewer split it into Part 1 and Part 2. Part 1: without clicking any cell, output the board after revealing it — mainly testing whether you know what number to output for cells next to a mine. Part 2: DFS. On Part 2 I got stuck because I didn't fully clarify the…

Technical Screen0
Weiss Asset ManagementData Scientist
Aug 2026

A Power Trading Forecast Case Study

Case study: It was a one-hour interview with two documents to read. The first provided background and a short introduction to the electricity market in power trading. The market participants included ordinary consumers, utility companies, electricity producers, and electricity traders. The basic assumptions were: Electricity prices stayed constant within a day, and ordinary consumers did not chan…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AirwallexData Scientist
Aug 2026

SQL Metrics and a KYC Conversion Case

I recently interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Airwallex and wanted to contribute my interview experience. Overall, it was SQL plus a case study. The questions themselves were not especially hard, but the pace was fairly fast, and the case placed more weight on product sense and analytical thinking. First part: SQL They gave me three tables, roughly sessions, signup, and merchant. I remember…

Technical Screen0
AmazonSDE 1
Aug 2026

Three Rounds, Rejected in Five Business Days

Amazon SDE 1 three-round interview experience: ultimately rejected. Round 1: Coding He first had me do a self-introduction, briefly going over my career plans, and then we moved into the coding part. Q: Design a file search API backend that supports recursive subdirectory search. There are a few edge cases to watch out for here. If the input directory is null or not a directory, the output should…

RejectedOnsite0
OpenAIFull-Stack Software Engineer
Aug 2026

Ship a Working App, Not Just LeetCode

Before I get into it: this is a writeup of my full process interviewing for a Full-Stack role at OpenAI, along with my impressions, as a reference for people prepping. OpenAI's interviews are pretty different from traditional big-tech interviews (especially the pure-LeetCode-grinding kind) — it leans a lot more toward "real engineering + product sense + mission fit," so if you only prepped LeetCo…

OfferOnsite0
ByteDanceSenior SDE, Quality Platform & AI Test AutomationSenior+
Aug 2026

AI QA Workflow Design and an Unfinished Merge Intervals

Good luck to everyone. I hope my bad example can help someone. Location: San Jose Role: Senior SDE, Quality Platform & AI Test Automation Interviewer: The team's QA leader; the interview was in Chinese over video with a shared whiteboard. Background: More than ten years in DevOps and engineering productivity. I have built CI/CD platforms and an AI code-review platform. How the interviewer framed…

Technical Screen0
Color HealthSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

AI-Assisted OA and Pair Programming

Color Health new graduate interview experience. Timeline I applied to this role twice. I received no response after the first application in mid-April. After applying a second time in late July, the recruiter reached out on August 5. August 7: received the online assessment. August 12: the recruiter replied that I had passed the assessment and scheduled a screening call. August 13: recruiter scre…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleAI/ML Full Stack Engineer
Aug 2026

Designing a 200TB Media Data Transfer Pipeline

Question Background The interviewer threw out a fairly open-ended system-design / data-engineering question: You have 200TB of media data (images/videos) that needs to be transferred to compute hosts / a compute cluster for processing (preprocessing, inference, training). How would you design this? There's no standard answer to this one. What it's actually testing is: can you pin down the scope o…

Other0
OracleBackend EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Five Rounds From Elimination Screen to Behavioral

Elimination Round Given an array and an integer k, find the top k most frequently occurring elements. If two elements have the same frequency, the larger element comes first. Questions about Java collections, PriorityQueue, HashMap, and related knowledge points. Deep dive into projects mentioned in the resume. Round 1 Given a string, split it into exactly three non-empty palindromic substrings. N…

Onsite0
VoleonSite Reliability Engineer
Aug 2026

Python Palindromes and a Bash find Deep Dive

The position is Site Reliability Engineer, so the interview covers Python and Linux. The questions weren't hard, but they really wore me out. Python: given a string, count how many palindrome groups (palindromic substrings) it contains. The correct approach is to scan the string and, from each position, expand outward in both directions. Bash: given a directory, output some deduplicated info abou…

In progressTechnical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Rejected After the Infrastructure Onsite Round

Phone Screen: Coding — Snapshot Set Implement a Set that supports snapshots. Besides the normal add/remove operations, you need to support creating a snapshot and being able to read the state of the set at a given snapshot moment. Onsite 1: System Design — Design a Payment System Design a payment system where a transaction first goes through an external payment service for approval/denial. Once a…

RejectedOnsite0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

System Design Screen on the Bookstore Question, Passed After a Week

The interviewer seemed like a very senior person, I felt his level was really high. I got the hugely popular Bookstore question. He asked a lot of questions about failure modes. For example: if the request inserts into the DB but then SQS fails, what should happen? How can we prevent that? I said I would use a transaction outbox. He said he had never heard of that pattern, we spent a while with m…

In progressTechnical Screen0
MongoDBSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Positive Crawler Feedback, Then Rejection the Next Day

I have no idea why I failed this interview. I finished both the original question and the follow-up, and the interviewer said both my approach and code looked good. Then I was told the next day that I'd been rejected. Question: Implement: Single-threaded first → Follow-up = find the bottleneck + speed it up with concurrency (= LC 1242 Web Crawler Multithreaded) The interviewer explicitly said the…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
C3 AIData Scientist
Aug 2026

The Coding Interviewer Never Appeared

This company still has an online OA, which I found a little surprising. It included some multiple-choice questions, and the last problem was a divide-and-conquer problem, LeetCode 395. In the first-round HM interview, the kind interviewer let me through. Second round: A 30-minute ML system-design interview. The interviewer asked me to design a shop-logistics system. Grocery-store products spoil e…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
NetAppSystem Software Engineer
Aug 2026

A 45-Minute C/C++ and OS Assessment

Job description NetApp's flagship storage operating system. C, C++, and Unix/Linux system programming are required. Familiarity with the design and development of system software. A strong understanding of operating-system internals. Personal background I worked in China from 2018 through 2025, then came to Ireland for a master's degree in 2025. I have about six years of work experience, so I am…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AirwallexSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Sunday Night System Design Screen Where the Interviewer Just Went Silent

This is an Australian payments company. Their dev team is mainly based in Singapore. When HR reached out, they picked a really late time slot to schedule things. Then for the phone screen, they booked me in for the system design round on Sunday night at 9pm. HR told me they use Whimsical for the whiteboard. But then it turned out the interviewer's team doesn't actually have a fixed whiteboard too…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

AI-Assisted Phone Screens, Rejected After Four Onsite Rounds

Two phone screens, coding with AI. My feeling is that you basically just need to show your ability to interact with AI — let the AI write all the code, and your job is mainly to review it, ask it what algorithm to use, how to design the functions and classes, and then once the code is done you comment on the problems with what it wrote. That's basically fine. I don't remember the actual problem.…

RejectedOnsite0

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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