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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DecagonAI Engineer
Jul 2026

A Tic-Tac-Toe Sequence-Counting Problem in the Coding Round

I recently interviewed for Decagon's AI Engineer role, first round (the coding round), and got a question that doesn't have an exact match on LeetCode, so I wanted to share it. Problem Two players take turns placing marks on a 3x3 board, X goes first, then O, alternating. A game is the entire sequence of moves from an empty board to the end of the game. The game ends immediately as soon as one si…

Technical Screen0
DoorDashSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Four-Round Virtual Onsite, Rejected in Three Days

Interview timeline: 6/15/2026 – DoorDash HR reached out on LinkedIn asking about my availability for an interview. 6/23/2026 – DoorDash first VO round, CodeCraft interview. The question was Dasher Pay — there are already write-ups about this problem, both here and elsewhere. There was a follow-up asking how to handle the double pay rate for dashers during peak hours. After I finished the code, th…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleForward Deployed Engineer
Jul 2026

Agentic System Design and a Coding Round That Turned Into 2D DP

The Google FDE interview mainly had two rounds. One round was basically an agentic system design round — just a casual chat with the interviewer about problems in agent system design. Questions included how to scale the agent, how to keep it safe, and what to do about agent infinite loops. The other round was SDE coding, and this is the one I really want to vent about. At first I felt pretty good…

Technical Screen1
Lead BankSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Coding Rounds Plus a Hotel Reservation System Design

The first coding round was similar to what people describe online — it's the one where you treat it as a stock ticker + date + price log. The interviewer guides you step by step, so you can pretty naturally arrive at the solution. Here's roughly what my code looked like: System design: the classic hotel reservation system design that shows up online a lot. Though there was a twist — the interview…

Onsite0
Hudson River TradingSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Watcher-and-Players Puzzle in the Technical Screen

This is the problem the interviewer described to me verbally during the technical screen, done in a coderpad environment. They also gave an example along with it. There is a game with multiple players. The road starts at position 0 and ends at position L. Each player has a starting position, and players can only move to the right, one unit per second. There is a watcher, starting at position W, i…

Technical Screen0
Capital OneData Analyst
Jul 2026

Same OA, Now Cruise-Themed Instead of Superheroes

I noticed there isn't much here about this OA, and I just finished mine, so I wanted to share. The two Canada-version posts from 2024 are completely outdated now — what's being tested currently is very similar to another report I found. Basically the approach for every question is the same, except it's no longer about superheroes, it's about cruises now. There are 12 questions total, but the firs…

Online Assessment0
AnthropicSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Community-Compiled Guide to the OA, Technical, and Values Rounds

Anthropic's SWE interview process breaks into three main parts: an online assessment (OA), one to two technical interviews, and a values/culture interview. This guide compiles experiences and community info from multiple candidates, in the hope that it helps people who are preparing. Timeline The whole process moves pretty slowly. Multiple candidates report gaps of 2-3 weeks between rounds. A typ…

Technical Screen0
MetaMachine Learning Engineer
Jul 2026

Four-Round Onsite, Rejected After Two AI Coding Rounds

I applied online to a search/ads/recommendation MLE role. The onsite was four rounds in total: behavioral, system design, and two rounds of AI coding. The behavioral round was just everyday questions, and the system design was a recommendation system. For coding, one question was a triple card game and the other was the maximum number of unique characters, both of them questions you can find onli…

RejectedOnsite0
Cockroach LabsSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Time Based Key-Value Store and a Choose-Your-Own System Design

LeetCode 981: Time Based Key-Value Store Design a timestamp-based key-value store data structure that supports set(key, value, timestamp) and get(key, timestamp). It tests whether you can bring down the time complexity of get by optimizing the data structure. The recommended direction is a hash table combined with arrays (e.g. unordered_map<string, vector<pair<int, string>>>), using binary search…

Onsite0
TeslaSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Live NumPy Coding on 3D Plane Fitting

Second round for the sensing engineer position. The interviewer had me write everything in numpy the whole time. I hadn't prepared for that at all and couldn't really write it, and after 10 minutes I already didn't want to keep going with the interview, but the interviewer kept pulling me along and dragged it out for the full time anyway. First question: given a list of 3D points and a plane repr…

Technical Screen0
LyftMachine Learning Engineer
Jul 2026

75-Minute Phone Screen with Train/Test Error Analysis and K-Means from Scratch

75 min. The first part was ML. They gave me 5 sets of training/test error and I had to analyze the possible causes. The cases included training high / test low, training low / test high, both low, and both high. I hadn't prepared for the training high / test low case and got stuck for a bit. The interviewer hinted that the train and test data might have different distributions, or that the traini…

In progressTechnical Screen0
LiftoffMachine Learning Engineer
Jul 2026

Onsite With a Dice Probability Question and a KV Store

Sigh, I felt like I did okay, but it still ended in tragedy. Thanks to the forum for the help, even though most of these questions were already in the earlier posts. The other rounds were pretty much the same as what is already posted. I did not see details on the statistics and probability questions, or on the KV store question, so let me add them. One question: you roll a 6-sided die 1000 times…

RejectedOnsite0
GoogleSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Rejected, Then an R1 Invite Two Weeks Later

I got the referral from a friend for the SWE III role. Three days after I applied I was already rejected — but then two weeks later the recruiter suddenly sent me an R1 invite, so I went ahead and did the interview. Coding — no self-introduction, straight into the problem. The question was roughly: given a graph where every edge has a safety value, and a given safety threshold, find the minimum s…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
MetaData Scientist
Jul 2026

Product Case on a Social Travel App, Then On to the Full Loop

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In progressTechnical ScreenPremium0
EliseAISoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

30-Minute Phone Screen with a Code-Reading Question

Format: 30 min video call. Mostly behavioral and experience questions, then a short code-reading exercise at the end. Questions: Tell me about yourself What are you looking for in a new role? Talk about a technical thing you've implemented at a previous company, including the technical decisions. What was the hardest part about that? What's something your previous engineering team didn't do well?…

Technical Screen0
Applied IntuitionSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Four-Round Onsite With AI-Assisted Coding

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OnsitePremium0
UpstartSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Six OA Questions Buried in Walls of Text

Very easy, 6 questions. The biggest challenge was that most of the questions were way too long — it took more than 2 minutes just to read and understand each one, and if you didn't pass on the first try, debugging got really stressful. For example, the first question (8 minute time limit) opened with a long paragraph about someone in medieval times who wrote a manuscript... two minutes later... t…

Online Assessment0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Ambiguous Word-Combination Problem, Rejected After a Rocky Phone Screen

Got rejected from the phone screen — I saw it on the portal before I even got the email. The interviewer opened with a hard problem, similar to a LeetCode problem, but it required outputting the actual combinations. It was really strange — the problem didn't say whether the word had to be in the given list, how many times each word could be used, or whether repeats were allowed. I asked him about…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Technical Rounds, Set Card Game Follow-up Ran Out of Time

I interviewed about a month ago. Mid level. The HR screen already told me they would ask medium to hard questions. There were 2 interviews of 1 hour each. In some of them you get 2 questions in the hour, in some just 1. We started with a quick self-introduction and then went straight into the problem. The first round was a variant of a known problem. It asked for the sum of all node values along…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
RobloxSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

A Robot Navigating a Laser-Covered Grid

The interview experience was good overall, and the interviewer was very friendly. This time I got a classic grid graph search/simulation question. The problem statement was quite long and needed careful reading. The original question follows: Problem description: Imagine a board of size numRows × numColumns with some lasers on it. These lasers are located in the two-dimensional array laserCoordin…

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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