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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OktaBackend EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

A Token-Bucket Take-home and Cross-Domain Login

HM Screening A conversation with the hiring manager, mainly about past project experience, behavioral questions, and various real workplace scenarios. Take-Home Assignment Build a rate limiter in Node.js using the token bucket algorithm. Create an Express application that can read a configuration file. Expose an API that returns a rate-limit response. Technical Round - Code Review & Debugging Cod…

Onsite0
LegoraSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

Fumbled the Live Coding, Rejected the Next Day

Sharing my interview experience at Legora for Senior Software Engineer in Stockholm, Sweden. First was a recruiter call to chat about my past experience, background and interest in the company. Second was a technical screen (45 mins) with one of the engineers on the team. Out of the 45 mins, 20 mins were for a project deep dive. They asked questions about tradeoffs, scale, challenges faced and wh…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MercorSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Technical Screen with Bloom Filter and Payment Idempotency Debugging

Almost all of these were questions I had already seen in interview experience posts! Worst sorting algorithm: I talked about enumerating every permutation and checking whether each one is sorted. Coffee shop: A and B each buy two cups of coffee. What is the probability that A's two cups taste better than B's two cups? There are 1M user_ids. How do you efficiently check whether an id exists, and a…

Technical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Phone Screen with Two Easy Questions, Onsite Invite a Week Later

I mass-applied to a position at the end of September, and also asked a person or two for referrals. The strange thing is that the referrals all went nowhere, and the one I applied to cold is the one that moved forward to an interview. The interviewer was pretty laid-back, maybe it's the company culture. They asked me what times I could interview, then disappeared for three or four days. Eventuall…

In progressTechnical Screen0
DuolingoSoftware EngineerIntern
Oct 2026

Karat Screen With Three Verbal Q&As and a Grid DFS Problem

I just finished the Duolingo Karat SWE Intern interview, so here is my writeup. Format: the first 10 minutes are 3 Q&A questions on algorithms and complexity analysis. No code to write, you just answer out loud. The remaining 45 minutes are one coding problem in Karat Studio, and you can pick your own language. You get one redo. It was basically the exact same problem that had already been posted…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Failed the Phone Screen on a Malloc Implementation

A recruiter reached out to me. I think my background was a good fit, because they only screened me a little before scheduling the phone interview. I got one question, malloc, with some tests provided. Part 1 was malloc/free. I wrote it by hand, using a list to simulate a linked list, and I couldn't get it to pass in one go. I debugged for a while, then the interviewer gave me a hint, I rewrote a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnrokSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

One-Hour Concurrency Round on Batching HTTP Requests, Rejected

1-hour interview, focused on concurrency. The interviewer has a bachelor's in CS from MIT. The role is SWE, AI Infra, and it requires a bachelor's plus 3 years of YOE. The problem: send an HTTP batch request to /get?keys=key1,key2 every 100ms. You need to think about how to schedule the 100ms callback, and how to store the keys waiting to be sent along with the callback for each key. Make sure ht…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AutodeskSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

A Project Deep Dive and Real-Time Data System Design

Only two rounds in total First round: project deep dive Second round: system design - "Design a real-time data processing system that consumes changes from operational databases, combines data from multiple sources, and maintains a queryable output dataset with low latency. Walk through the architecture you would choose and how you would handle correctness, updates and deletes, ordering, state, f…

Onsite0
Walmart LabsMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

A Surprise Agentic Search Design Round

Sharing a data point. I mainly used this as a warm-up and for practice, and I pretty much didn't plan to join. This position was entirely team-specific hiring, so it could vary a lot case by case. The logistics were quite chaotic, but the conversations themselves were a pretty good experience. The first round was with the hiring manager: a casual half-hour conversation about project experience an…

Onsite0
AtlassianFrontend EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

20 Minutes of Coding, 10 of System Design, Rejected

A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and that's how I got this interview. Right after we talked, the interview invitation came the same day. The recruiter was extremely efficient. I just wanted to get in as fast as possible, so I only gave myself one week to prepare. Not being well prepared was also one of the reasons I failed later. I booked a technical screen for a week out. You can use yo…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
PerplexitySoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Phone Screen Rejected After a File System Question Ran Over Time

This was a question already reported on the forum: a file system problem. I got through the first two parts basically on the first try. The interesting thing was that the interviewer kept interrupting me while I was writing, asking what this function does and why I wrote it that way. I said it would be clear once I finished writing. When I was done I walked him through it with an example, and he…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three Back-to-Back Onsite Rounds, Rejected the Next Day

10/6: back-to-back 3 rounds. 1st: project deep dive. 2nd: system design, a job scheduler. 100,000 job definitions, 10,000 concurrent job runs, all cron jobs, no immediate run, at-least-once guarantee. I get the feeling the interviewers also prepare from stuff they find online. I followed a popular online breakdown of this problem and added a schedule entity, and the interviewer questioned why it…

RejectedOnsite0
RobinhoodSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Market Data API Design Round, Expecting a Rejection

Design the Robinhood Marketdata API GET /quotes/{symbol}/live: real-time quote, ~10M qps GET /quotes/{symbol}/historical?range=(1d,1m,1y): historical range, ~1M qps They gave me a data source, NASDAQ Last Sale: two independent, redundant long-lived TCP connections (Conn A/B); about 7,000 symbols; peak of ~100k trades/s on each connection; 6.5 trading hours per day. Message format: symbol (4-5 ASC…

In progressOnsite0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Four-Level Parcel Attribute OA, 410/600

The AI-organized question lists I used for the past three months of OAs were basically useless, and I didn't get any repeat questions. It's the same as what people on the forum have been reporting lately: I mass-applied and got the OA instantly. But it's still the 90-minute, four-level format. The problem gives you a batch of Parcels. Each Parcel has its own ParcelId and attributes (key, value),…

Online Assessment0
VisaSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

Proctored 90-Minute OA with Three Questions

Format: three questions, 90 minutes. It is proctored, you have to keep your camera on, and they record your screen too. Given a String, return the number of words in it. Example: He has 1 million do[[ars, isnt he? The steps in the problem statement are: first split the String on spaces into words, then throw out any word that contains digits or symbols other than punctuation (comma, period, quest…

Online Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2026

Power Day with Behavioral, Case Study and Agentic Coding

Sharing a recent Capital One TDP Power Day interview report. The Power Day had three rounds in total: Behavioral, Case Study, and Agentic Coding. The Behavioral round was pretty standard, basically all classic BQ. As long as you prepare a few projects ahead of time and tell the stories clearly with the STAR framework, you should be fine. Teamwork, conflict, and failure are especially worth prepar…

Onsite0
MergeSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Data Class Design Then a 3-Level Org Chart Problem, Rejected

The questions were quite different from the earlier interview reports. The difficulty isn't high, but you need to write code fast. The interview was split into two parts. Part 1: I was first given a set of API return values and asked to design a common data class to store that data. This part took about 20-25 minutes, and they also asked a few simple questions about DB and system design. Part 2:…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

L6 Phone Screen With an Impatient Interviewer, LCA Follow-up Stuck

The interviewer was impossible to find anywhere online, I couldn't find a thing about him and I'm speechless. BQ: 1. How do you evaluate customer experience? 2. A major unexpected obstacle. For the first one, I think the point of the question was the evaluation part, and my story was just directly collecting feedback, which he wasn't happy with 😭 For the second one, he felt the obstacle wasn't ma…

Technical Screen1
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Delivery Cost Calculation with an AI Assistant

I did the Rippling technical screen last week. It was online coding with an AI assistant. The problem was the Delivery Cost calculation that has shown up here before (the calculate_compensation version). Summary of the problem: a food delivery platform pays drivers per delivery, and the cost is duration × that driver's hourly rate. You implement a dashboard system whose core is a single number, t…

In progressTechnical Screen0
DRWSoftware EngineerIntern
Oct 2026

Codility OA, 115 Minutes, Three Easy Problems

Overall pretty easy, with plenty of time to spare. The first two problems have no complexity requirement, pure brute force is fine, and the algorithm for the third one isn't hard either. Given an array, you can change the value of any three numbers. What is the smallest possible difference between the max and the min? Given a string made of lowercase letters, define a balanced string as one where…

Online Assessment0

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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