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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OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

ChatGPT System Design, Vector Store and a Scheduler Debugging Round, Rejected

SWE VO System design: design ChatGPT. At first the interviewer said not to worry about scale and no need to persist anything. Later they asked why use SSE instead of WebSocket, and also asked how to optimize the frontend so that long conversations can still render well. Coding: all new questions I had never seen. I used Python. Vector Store The problem is to implement a simplified vector store th…

RejectedOnsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Phone Screen Package Installer, Onsite Topological Sort

Phone Interview Given a mapping (Map / Adjacency List) of software packages and their dependencies, write a class or method to install a specified package along with all of its dependencies. Assume each package object has an install() method that only installs that package itself and does not handle its dependencies. Need to implement an installWithDependencies(package) method that makes sure all…

Onsite0
Walmart LabsSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Disorganized Onsite Hiring Event

Actually, this is just me venting... First, the onsite is called a "hiring event," and there were about a dozen people there. After checking in, we even had to walk back to the car to put up the parking permit — pretty chaotic. The hiring manager for the BQ round was 15 minutes late! If they hadn't shown up soon, I was ready to pack up and leave. The conversation itself was pretty mediocre — not…

Onsite0
CognitivSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

High-Bar Technical Screen, Rejected Over Spark and C#

Cognitiv is a small startup that works with ads data. They were opening a new office in Canada, so they were hiring. After the recruiter interview, the first round was scheduled with the hiring manager. They asked BQ questions along with technical experience questions related to what the team needed — things like how to handle data duplication, Spark-related questions, how to scale data... If you…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
UpstartSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Recalling All 5 Online Assessment Questions

All 5 real questions, fully recalled. Question 1: Sum of multiples of 3, 5, 7 less than a given number For example, if the given number is 12, the multiples of 3 below it are 3, 6, and 9; the multiples of 5 are 5 and 10; and the multiple of 7 is 7 — so sum = 3 + 6 + 9 + 5 + 10 + 7 = 40 (12 itself, although a multiple of 3, is not included). Note: the original post's formatting here was garbled (s…

Online Assessment0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

75-Minute Malloc Screen, CoderPad Crashed, Advanced Anyway

There's not much to say about the question itself — it's just malloc. But the interview process wasn't quite what I imagined, so I'm sharing it for everyone's reference. The interviewer's background looked very, very strong. After reading the question, I went with the standard interview-report format and started with first-fit. The interviewer pressed for a ton of detail — what data structure to…

In progressTechnical Screen0
Scale AIBackend Engineer
Jul 2026

Full Onsite Loop with a Claude-Assisted Coding Round

I mass-applied for an infra role that sits under the ML research org. The interview process matched what other people have already posted here on the forum. Onsite loop: Task scheduler VO BQ: Standard questions, and it ended early. The highlight was during the time to ask questions back — I asked the interviewer if there was anything she didn't like about Scale AI, and she said that because of RT…

Onsite0
AnthropicSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jul 2026

Pool Hire to Team Match, Onsite, Now at Reference Check

Two working days after my referral, a recruiter contacted me. I interviewed for a senior SWE role. Step one was the OA. The problem was a bank system. I had prepared for it ahead of time, so I just had the answer memorized, and I got a perfect score. I heard it's best to get a perfect score. Recruiter call: they ask why Anthropic and what you think about AI safety. Phone screen coding: cat image…

In progressOnsite0
Epic SystemsSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Jul 2026

Epic Just Switched OA Question Banks, Old One Is Useless

Epic's official guide has been updated — first a phone call with a colleague introducing the role, then an online technical assessment. It's completely different from the old question bank. I'm a new grad currently job hunting, sharing this in good faith. True/False/Cannot Determine — 5 min Each question gives 4-5 facts, and you judge 5 statements as true, false, or cannot be determined. Roughly…

Online Assessment0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Six-Stage Onsite Loop from Brain Teasers to Bar Raiser

Stage 1 Coding Question Max profit using a single buy and sell (best time to buy and sell stock, limited to one transaction). Technical Question Bottom view of a binary tree — explain the implementation approach and the reasoning behind it. Technical Question Find the minimum number of processes allocated. System Design Given a series of webpage URLs (including schemaName, host, port), design a v…

Onsite0
TemuSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

LinkedIn Screen with a Twitter Feed Min-Heap Question

A recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, and that's how the interview got set up. Headquarters is in Boston, but all the hiring is remote. Every role interviewed under the title "software engineer," and the package gets negotiated after based on how you do in the interview. The first round was 60 minutes of coding, and here's how it went: Self-introduction, then they asked about my projects in…

Technical Screen0
Jain GlobalData Engineer
Jul 2026

Three Rounds on Data Quality, User Support, and a Compliance Modeling Case

round 1: What data issues have you run into during backtesting? How do you do identifier resolution? How do you choose among multiple vendor sources and backfill between them? How do you handle stale data, missing data, and outliers? How do you avoid look-ahead bias in data like earnings estimates? If backtest results suddenly change, how do you determine whether it's a model, code, or data probl…

Technical Screen0
NVIDIASoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

GPU Search Engine Team Phone Screen on Counting Distinct Strings

This is for a team at Nvidia that is turning an open-source search engine into a GPU implementation. I personally have no hardware or GPU experience at all. They replied the day after I applied and said they wanted a phone screen, and I found out early on, after looking into the background of the interviewer, that the interviewer was a hardware engineer. I assumed they cared about my search engin…

Technical Screen0
UberSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Phone Screen, Onsite with Graph DB Design, Then Silence

Phone screen: similar to the Design Meeting Scheduler on hack2hire, but simpler. Onsite: coding 1 was serialization and deserialization of an n-ary tree. Coding 2 I really can't remember. The system design was about using a graph DB to store who can access which resources (this was role-related, not a general system design), how to migrate over from the existing DB, how to design the schema, scal…

No responseOnsite0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Recipe-Management OA With Brutal Corner Cases

Fresh off the OA, just did it. I'm saying I definitely failed because I only passed two levels. I wrote level 3 but a few test cases wouldn't pass, and I never even got to see level 4. The problem itself isn't hard, but there are a ton of corner cases, and you need every single test case to pass before you can move on to the next level. I also feel like this is a brand new question bank, because…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
HeadwaySoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Onsite with a Rate Limiter, an Airbnb Design Question, and an AI-Assisted Debugging Round

Coding The problem: implement a Fixed Window Rate Limiter. Implement a rate limiter middleware for a web service built on FastAPI and Uvicorn. Every request has to satisfy both of these at the same time: Global limit: at most 100 requests per minute Domain limit: at most 3 requests per second per domain If either limit gets triggered, the request should be rejected. They wanted the fixed-window v…

Onsite0
Moody'sSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Onsite System Design for a Product Inventory Service

System Design Design a Product Inventory & Pricing Service for an e-commerce platform Functional requirements: get product details, update product price, update inventory when a user places an order. System requirements: this is a read-heavy system, so we needed to discuss the Consistency vs Availability tradeoff, plus authorization for inventory updates. Technical approach discussion: SQL vs NoS…

Onsite0
ZipRecruiterMachine Learning Engineer
Jul 2026

A CodeSignal Bug Hunt in Go

I haven't seen a ZipRecruiter MLE interview report on the forum before, so let me share my first-round experience: The recruiter told me it would be on CodeSignal, using some obscure language to find a bug, and that I could ask the interviewer syntax-related questions. The interviewer was a senior software engineer with 4 years at the company. He introduced himself first, then had me introduce my…

RejectedTechnical Screen1
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Perfect OA, Rejected at the ML Inference System Design Phone Screen

I bugged a former coworker for a referral, and then got rejected right at the phone screen. The round was a system design interview, a classic ML inference design question. I felt okay about it after the interview and don't know why I got rejected. There were a few points where I think I either matched what the interviewer wanted, or was way off. The interviewer gave basically no real-time feedba…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
DatabricksSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Cleared the Full Onsite, Then Rejected After a Messy Reference-Check Saga

Phone screen: system design — design a music playlist. The recruiter told me it would be a full-stack SD round with front-end code and everything, so I spent a long time brushing up on React, but it turned out to just be a normal SD round with no front-end content at all. My answer was pretty average. The interviewer seemed nice but looked exhausted the whole time — not sure if he was just overwo…

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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