Interview Experiences

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

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DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Dasher Pay Phone Screen with a Surprise Sweep Line and Peak Windows Follow-up

This was the dasher pay question from the interview reports on the forum. I spent a good chunk of time up front discussing the requirements and the data shape. I wanted to get part 1 done with a simple algorithm first and worry about the rest later, and I had already finished writing it, but the interviewer was clearly unhappy and hinted that I should use a sweep line. Changing the code took quit…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Fault-Tolerant Work Queue Coding Plus a Metrics Monitoring Design Round

Coding Fault-Tolerant Work Queue I solved the first part but got stuck on one silly bug which took a long time, but I got it to green eventually. I coded up the second part quickly but couldn't run the code due to time. The interviewer said it should be okay, that I was very close, and that I am good. System Design Metrics monitoring variation I did okay in this round. The interviewer didn't seem…

In progressTechnical Screen0
LinkedInMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

Debugging Logistic Regression, Then Job Click Prediction Design

The first part was 30 minutes of debugging a logistic regression implementation. I spent too much time on the sigmoid derivative at the start, so I didn't finish the last step, computing the gradients. Then came 20 minutes of ML design: Predict whether a member will click on a displayed job using member features, job content, and interaction history. I had to define everything myself: what data i…

Technical Screen0
Qualified HealthSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Dismissive Interviewer and Workflow System Design

I generally don't like judging interviewers or companies, but this company was pretty disgusting. Right from the start, they said that if I didn't interview well, I'd be kicked out early, in the middle of the interview. The person who came in was a technical team lead, looking arrogant. HR was out of their mind and scheduled him for two rounds in a row, one behavioral and one system design. He wa…

Onsite0
MicrosoftSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Four Rounds in One Day, Not Selected

The JD said the role is in Windows + Devices, with two teams, WSSI and AI Trust. The interviewer said the role mainly works on privacy and compatibility. There were 5 interviews in total: The first one was a CV + technical questions round, but I think they only asked about my resume and BQ. Then four rounds, all scheduled on the same day. Round 1: BQ + Coding Why Microsoft and why this role The t…

RejectedOnsite0
IBMSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Passed the Coding OA, Failed the Behavioral OA

Two problems, 75 minutes. The first problem was counting triplets. You're given an array and a number d, and you have to return the number of triplets that satisfy a condition: in each triplet, the difference between the largest number and the smallest number can't be greater than d. My first solution was to sort the whole array and then use two nested for loops to find the smallest and largest n…

RejectedOnline Assessment1
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

OA, a Great Recruiter, and a Tree-Rendering VO Where I Finished Two Parts

I got the OA the same day I applied, probably a mass send-out. It was almost entirely a math problem, three parts in one hour, and the time was a bit tight. Part 1: Data Center Registration and Health State Management Part 2: Computing the Haversine Distance Part 3: Proximity-Based Routing A few days later I got the usual HR call. They said I did well on the OA, and asked me to briefly go over my…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment with a Merge-Strings Conflict Problem and an AI Spring Boot Bug-Fix Task

CODE Given two strings (lowercase English letters), primary and secondary, with lengths m and n respectively, try to merge them into one string: Keep the original order within each string A smaller character has higher priority A conflict is defined as the case where a character with low priority is merged before a character with high priority in the final merged string. For example, if the merge…

Online Assessment1
CoreWeaveSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Database and Notification System Design Onsite, Then a Skeptical HM Round

This recruiter gives very specific prep notes. For the phone screen they basically told me the questions outright. They gave notes for the Onsite too, but the design questions themselves are very open ended, so the notes only help a little. For reference only ~ Database design: the interviewer was friendly and easy to talk to. His day-to-day work isn't DB internals, so I'm not sure whether I answ…

Onsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Task Scheduler Phone Screen, AI Optional, Rejected

Sharing my Rippling phone screen. Phone screen, first round (coding): The problem was something like a task scheduler, but the requirements were very complicated and there were a huge number of conditions. It's not hard, but the details explode. Roughly: Tasks have dependencies, and when outputting I had to output the dependency first and then the task itself. Tasks have various attribute require…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
VerkadaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Technical Screen on Finding the Camera Super Admin

Problem description In an enterprise role- and group-based permission system (RBAC), there are three kinds of entities: users (User), groups (Group), and cameras (Camera). The input is a list of permission relations, perms_data, where every element is a triple (source, relationship, destination). There are two core relationships: "camera_owner": the format is (entity, "camera_owner", camera_id).…

Technical Screen0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Round 2 With Two Coding Questions and a URL Router

Coding 1: LeetCode 210. The follow-ups were all very easy: Add a validity check Time/space complexity Test cases Change the output to a nested list Coding 2: Implement a URL request handler router that needs to support two functions: processHandler(String handler): registers a handler, for example /users/delete or /users/{userId}/photo/{photoId}. getHandler(String url): takes a real URL, for exam…

Onsite0
NetflixMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

ML Fundamentals Plus a Production PR Review, Rejected

Sharing a failure story from September. The recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, and then we scheduled a phone screen. Since this was hiring for a newly formed applied GenAI org, the format was pretty new and I haven't seen it in any other interview write-ups: 30 min of ML fundamentals + 30 min of practical coding. 30 min ML fundamentals, three questions: What is a KV cache? What is attention…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
WaymoData Scientist
Sep 2026

Rare Events, Sampling, and Probability Coding

A recruiter contacted me. After screening and a technical screen, I went into four interview rounds. I've made the original questions less specific for others preparing. Data Intuition, first round A new version performs significantly better in offline evaluation, in simulation, but shows no difference after going live. What could cause that? How would you model a rare event using a log form, and…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AnthropicData Scientist
Sep 2026

A Recruiter Screen and Nonnegotiable Offer Terms

I applied online among lots of other applications, then only heard from a recruiter a month later. When I went back to look for the job description, the posting was already down... I asked her for the job description, but she didn't send it either. There were also more questions than in a typical recruiter round. Why Anthropic? Why are you a good fit? Why leave your current company? Why AI compan…

In progressHR Screen0
MongoDBSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Failed the First-Round UnionIterator Question

First round phone screen. I got asked an Iterator question, and I failed because I didn't practice enough. I'm sharing the question for everyone. Overall I thought the interview experience was pretty good. The interviewer was really nice and gave me hints, and I feel like their company culture is good too, and the work-life balance is good as well. Implement a UnionIterator class that takes two s…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
OpenAIData Scientist
Sep 2026

Free-Trial Take-home and Four Final Interview Rounds

Take-home assignment + live review take home assignment related to free trial Explore the data, identify key insights, and make recommendations. Deliver a polished and concise slide deck. This is followed by a 1-hour live interview: 20–25 minutes: take home discussion 20–25 minutes: hands on sql 10 minutes: python debug Hiring Manager Interview 1 hour project deep dive with the hiring manager Ons…

Onsite0
AffirmData AnalystSenior+
Sep 2026

A Downlevel After Passing the Take-home

In July, a kind younger alum referred me for Full Stack Analyst II. In early August, HR contacted me to say that role was gone and asked whether I'd consider another Senior Analyst role. After that, it was one step each week: HR call -> hiring manager interview -> take-home. The HM case: Analyze what could have caused the delinquency rate to jump in the past quarter. The take-home: What product a…

In progressTake-home Project0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Straight-to-Code Phone Screen, Multi-Family Unit Conversion Graph in Java

I had prepped for a resume deep dive or BQ, but the moment it started, without a word, we went straight into the problem. It's been a long time since I had such a pure interview. It was a variant of LC 3535 (unit conversion), which I'd also seen in an earlier interview report. The difference is that there's more than one family of unit conversions, e.g. temperature is one series and length is ano…

In progressTechnical Screen0
VisaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Three-Round Onsite With Longest Increasing Path, a Greedy Problem, and an Inventory Service Design

Round 1: the original LeetCode problem, longest-increasing-path-in-a-matrix. Debugging wasn't very convenient. I also had to write my own test cases and my own main, so that held me up for a long time and I didn't have enough time. At the end I brought up the optimal solution, using memoization to record results, but I was out of time. > Given an m x n integers matrix, return the length of the lo…

Onsite0

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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