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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ComposioFullstack EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

AI-Assisted Take-Home Plus a One-Take Code Walkthrough Video

I'm an OSU CS master's student, graduating in December 2026. Process. It's on a platform called Litmus. You run litmus init and that starts a 150-minute timer that can't be paused. The problem: you're given an API catalog with a few hundred tools (each with full input/output JSON Schema), and you write a generator that automatically infers the dependency graph between tools — i.e. which tool's mi…

In progressTake-home Project0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Phone Screens Then a Four-Round Onsite

Phone Screen 1: Coding — Implement Hit Counter Implement a Hit Counter that records the time of each request and can query how many hits happened in the last 5 minutes, i.e. within 300 seconds. Main interface: hit(timestamp) records a request getHits(timestamp) returns the number of requests in the past 300 seconds You can use a queue, or a circular buffer aggregated by second. The focus is on ho…

Onsite0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

30 Minutes, Misread One Rule, No Time to Fix

My HRT interview had the same question as this other post (the link I'm referring to is dropped here). Their bar is really high. In half an hour you need to understand the problem, explain the problem, explain your approach, write the code, explain the code, and run it. I went straight to the optimized solution: record the capacity in each of the four directions (up, down, left, right) for every…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
VisaSoftware Engineer I
Aug 2026

CodeSignal OA and Two Technical Rounds

CodeSignal online assessment Array operations: given arrays A and B, count the pairs for which A[i] + B[j] equals a specified target. Matrix rotation and boundary handling: rotate an N by N matrix clockwise, then perform special calculations on boundary elements according to specified conditions. String processing and sliding window: find substrings in a long string that match a specified pattern…

Technical Screen0
J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer II
Aug 2026

Four Rounds from System Design to RAG

Round 1: Hiring Manager System design: choose a project you previously worked on, design and explain its architecture end to end, and answer related follow-up questions. Database optimization: given a database table with user_id and region columns and more than one million rows, how would you optimize a query that looks up a specific record? Database indexing. Table partitioning. Sharding. Replic…

Onsite0
MetaSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Phone Screen Plus a Four-Round Virtual Onsite

Meta phone screen + virtual onsite writeup, with the questions and my thought process included. Since I signed an NDA, I'm coding the problem names as homophones — sorry about that. Phone Screen 45 minutes, two questions. The first five minutes were self-intro, and pretty much the rest of the time was spent coding. Question 1, coded 1091: a 2D grid, get from the top-left corner to the bottom-righ…

Onsite0
Jump TradingData Scientist
Aug 2026

A Live O(1) Rolling Mean Question and Deep Factor Grilling

Since this is an experienced hire, there are relatively fewer coding questions. There's a lot more talk about your resume and the methodology behind your past factors — and they go into it in real depth, the kind that gives you chills and makes your heart pound. If you don't actually have results to back it up and you're just talking up your own effect, it's basically very hard to get through. Li…

Onsite0
Uber FreightSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Real-Time Restaurant Analytics Dashboard System Design Round

System Design Design a real-time Restaurant Analytics Dashboard System requirements: show order volume, top dishes, and revenue for the past 1h, 1d, and 7d. Data must update in real time, and throughput needs to support 100K orders/sec. Primary store schema design: determine the primary storage's tables, partition key, and columns. Cache key design: determine the Redis key pattern and the corresp…

Onsite0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Product Pages, Trackable Links, and Anonymous Users

Design a platform that can provide companies with the ability to create and showcase their product details through dedicated pages while also offering a shareable link feature for dissemination across various social media platforms like Facebook and more. Key Objectives: Companies can create/update product detailed page with images and description. The system can have a robust shareable link mech…

Onsite0
D. E. ShawData Scientist
Aug 2026

Easy Technical Screen on Portfolio Variance, Rejected After a Long Wait

I got rejected after the first round, after a very long wait. I still think it was my resume that got me rejected. The technical questions were pretty easy. The interviewer was super young, felt like a new grad, and felt like they had just woken up. Their hair was still pretty messy, and it felt like they were at home. Honestly, the person who referred me also felt like a new grad. I feel like th…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
RemitlyStaff AI-Native EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

An AI-Assisted Transfer Price Comparison Prototype

This team is looking for an AI-native engineer whose main responsibility is making various internal processes and tools AI-driven. They started interviewing with AI coding last quarter. You need to set up your own AI environment and share your screen. The AI coding interview mainly evaluates how you use AI, so the problem itself is usually not very hard. This one was considered one of the more co…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A Four-Level Banking System Online Assessment

I recently took Airbnb's software engineering online assessment. I hope this question format helps people who take it later. One of the online assessment questions was a banking system or filesystem with unit tests. It was similar to CodeSignal's progressive-level problems. It was not a set of independent LeetCode questions; instead, new requirements kept being added to the same codebase. The ove…

Online Assessment0
GoogleSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Five Onsite Rounds Where Follow-Ups Decide Everything

I've been lurking for a long time, and this time I picked up a lot of good material from the forum before my own interview, so I'm posting this to give back. I'm using the forum's usual numeric code-names for the problems, so bear with me. Google's pacing is very different from Meta's. Each round is 45 minutes with basically one main question, and the rest of the time is all follow-ups — the inte…

Onsite1
RobloxSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Puzzle-Game Assessment, Then a Match-3 and Autocomplete Phone Screen

Sharing my Roblox interview experience, hoping it helps everyone. I'm still in the middle of interviewing right now. I applied to Roblox with three years of full-time experience, mass-applying as an experienced hire. I don't know why, but they first gave me an online assessment, which is mostly playing their little puzzle games plus answering some behavioral questions. I have to complain about th…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

90-Minute Four-Level OA, Only Passed Two Levels

The OA was 90 minutes with 4 levels, and I used C++. Looking back, I probably should have used Python, which would have saved a lot of time. They also require your camera and mic on the whole time plus screen recording, and you have to show ID before you start. No AI assistance at all; they said you can keep one tab open for looking up syntax. It has really been a long time since I last job hunte…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
UberMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

45 Min Coding Plus 15 Min Free-Form ML Design, Onsite Invite Next Day

The phone screen format was 45 min coding + 15 min design. For coding I got the high-frequency "find robot" problem. I discussed the brute force solution with the interviewer, then how to precompute the distances in all four directions to speed it up, and finally wrote the optimized version. The interviewer didn't provide any test cases in HackerRank and didn't ask me to write any either. I only…

In progressTechnical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Rate Limiter in CoderPad, Ran Out of Time Before the Distributed Follow-up

Snowflake phone screen, one hour, writing Python in CoderPad, and I was allowed to use AI. The recruiter said this round looks at how you ask about requirements, how you test, and how you debug. [Question] Build a rate limiting service. Different clients can have different rate limit tiers, for example free, pro and enterprise. The limits for each tier can be updated at runtime without restarting…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Call Stack Sampling and GPU Weight Distribution System Design

I interviewed this past Thursday. The first question was: given continuous call stack samples, generate timestamped function start/end events. While I was answering, the interviewer kept pushing back with follow-up questions, including things like: How do you compute the change between adjacent call stacks using the longest common prefix? Why do end events go from inside out, while start events g…

In progressTechnical Screen0
eBaySoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three Onsite Rounds With Two System Designs

Round 1 Given an array heights, where each element represents the height of a vertical line. Choose two lines to act as the walls of a container. Return the maximum amount of water the container can hold (max area). Given an array of integers temps representing daily temperatures, write a function to calculate, for each day, how many days you'd have to wait until a warmer temperature. The functio…

Onsite0
BasetenSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Screen Plus 4-Round VO, Rejected Two Weeks Later

A recruiter reached out to me by email. I didn't actually know this company at first, but later I found out it does AI inference and is a competitor of Fireworks. They're already at Series F with a $13B valuation. Supposedly their headcount is going to grow 50% this year. I interviewed for the General SWE position. The process was as follows: Recruiter call HM call (background + behavioral) Techn…

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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