Interview Experiences

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

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DiscordData ScientistSenior+
Sep 2026

Hiring Manager and Python Phone Screen Passed

I've recently been interviewing for a Senior DS role at Discord. I just passed the hiring manager and technical phone interviews and am preparing for the virtual onsite. HM: Introduce yourself. Behavioral question: Tell me about a time you used causal inference to solve a business issue. What was the challenge, and what would you do if you did this project again? At the end there was a small case…

In progressTechnical Screen0
Goldman SachsQuantitative Researcher
Sep 2026

Two GSAM Quant Roles, Live Coding Plus TSP, Then No Headcount

I interviewed for two GSAM quant roles at the same time. Role one was more like a fund of funds kind of group. First round was live coding: power of ten and Newton's method square root. Second round was already the final round on-site: one medium problem that was not the usual kind, one expected value problem, and one round that was purely chatting about my experience. Role two was the equity SMA…

Onsite0
Uber FreightSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

DSA, a File System LLD, and a URL Shortener Design

Round 1 — DSA There is a car and N riders. Each rider has two constraints: L[i] — the minimum number of other riders this rider is willing to share the ride with. H[i] — the maximum number of other riders this rider is willing to share the ride with. If k riders are selected, every selected rider must satisfy L[i] <= k - 1 <= H[i]. The goal is to maximize the number of riders who can ride togethe…

Onsite0
ByteDanceSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

E-commerce Backend, One Technical Round Ending on Spiral Matrix Follow-ups

TikTok SWE Intern, E-commerce Backend. Referral. One virtual round. Rejected. Background Applied through a referral. Position and team: E-commerce Backend. Timeline 08/06 applied 08/07 received the OA 08/23 HR scheduled the interview 09/11 first technical round 09/26 got the result (rejected) Round 1, Technical (1 hr) The interviewer spoke Chinese and the whole thing was in Chinese. Self-introduc…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

OA with the Deployment Window Scheduler, Part 2 Unfinished

This was the OA round. It's the Deployment Window Scheduler problem that has already been posted on the forum. Build a deployment-window scheduler over a recurring 10,080-minute week. Find all deployable time slots. Part 1: the input is <startTime, endTime, type>, where type is either allowed or freeze. Output the deployable time slots <startTime, endTime>. Part 2: the first line of the input is…

Online Assessment0
OracleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

OCI Onsite Where the Director Skipped System Design and a Surprise LLD Round, Rejected Without Feedback

JD: a public posting on Oracle's careers site. I mass-applied. Got a recruiter call the very next day, a phone screen a week later, and the onsite another week after that. I interviewed over two days, Wednesday and Thursday. Got told today that I failed, and they won't give any feedback. After talking with them, it felt like there are a lot of openings and they're actively hiring. Phone screen: c…

RejectedOnsite0
MercorMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

Three Onsite Rounds, Kicked Out of the Meeting Room Mid-Interview

I finished interviewing at this company yesterday. My background is physics AI. I did competitive programming back in high school, and I figured I could cram a system design book for a few days and pass this onsite. Turns out I was still too green. The questions were pretty standard; it's on me for being too weak and wasting the opportunity. The interview was chaotic: in the middle of it, people…

Onsite0
PersonaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI-Enabled CodeSignal Screen, URL Shortener, Ran Out of Time

Format: 60 min on CodeSignal. Using CodeSignal's built-in Claude terminal (kept getting throttled, and very slow). The interviewer evaluates how you scope the work, direct the AI, and verify what it produces, not whether you can type it all yourself. Problem: URL shortener (internal go-links) Build an internal go-link tool, e.g. go.internal/ifd → a Notion page. It's scoped to about 100 users, so…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Reconciliation, a requests 307 Bug Squash, BikeMap and an AI Exercise, No Offer

Payment / Invoice Reconciliation (problem as I reconstructed it) Part 1: match by the invoice ID in the memo. Parse the payment and invoice strings, use the invoice ID in the payment's memo to find the matching invoice, and return the string the problem specifies. A payment has a payment ID, an amount and a memo; an invoice record has an invoice ID, an amount and a due date. Part 2: add amount ma…

RejectedOnsite0
ValonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen on an Out-of-Order Loan Ledger

This was the phone screen. It was an OOP coding problem about a bank ledger. I had seen someone mention it on the forum but with no specifics, and if you haven't prepared in advance, time gets a bit tight. The first part is designing a simple dataclass and 2 basic functions, which are just simple addition and subtraction. The second part is the real focus. You design 2 functions that handle the 2…

Technical Screen0
AttentiveSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Leveled Up to Senior Bar, Rejected After a Messy System Design

I applied for SWE II. HR call - 2026-08-26 The questions were: How much do you know about Attentive? Are you actively interviewing right now? Do you have any offer deadlines? Do you need sponsorship? What are the compensation range you are targeting? Then they asked me to introduce myself. Are you able to talk about a feature or product that you work on like end-to-end or a zero-to-one product? W…

RejectedOnsite0
LyftSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Wiki Crawler Design and a Talent Pool Rejection

The phone screen was the typical one: they give you an API that can fetch pages, and you write a wrapper that calls this external API to implement fetching by word count. Onsite, showtime. The system design was wiki crawling: how do you crawl all of the wiki's content and store it, while keeping it updated within a certain time window, for example no more than five days stale. The coding was the…

RejectedOnsite0
PinterestData Scientist
Sep 2026

Two SQL Questions and Similar Pins in Python

I'm sharing the questions I encountered in a Pinterest technical interview. I've organized them to give back, and I hope this helps anyone preparing! The descriptions below are reconstructed from memory. I've simplified the field names; these aren't word-for-word copies of the original questions. SQL: The top two categories by engagement rate in each country (I don't quite remember exactly how ma…

Technical Screen0
eBayApplied Scientist
Sep 2026

Six Rounds, Then the Role Went On Hold and Was Cancelled

After six rounds of interviews they told me straight up that the position was on hold, and a month later they let me know the position had been cancelled. I suspect the interviewers had known about this for a long time, which is why the interviews were so all over the place and never lined up with anything. The questions I spent ages preparing were basically wasted effort. I'm sharing the questio…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One Hiring Manager Round on Terraform Provisioning, Then a Rejection

The first round was a 55-minute interview. From my own digging before the interview, I figured out that the person interviewing me was the Hiring Manager. The first half was just chatting with them. Every Apple interview I've done so far has been like this. The last 20-some minutes were some high-level design questions. This team does management and maintenance of infra, and the question was very…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
Boston Consulting GroupSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Five Behavioral Questions in a One-Way Video Interview

BCG X Forward Deployed AI Engineer, one-way video interview. These were the five questions, that's it. Prep time is unlimited, and you get two recording attempts. Describe your understanding of BCG X in 3-5 sentences (who we are, what we do etc.) and what motivated you to apply. Describe the last analytical tool you taught yourself, why you chose it, how you taught yourself. Please tell me about…

Online Assessment0
ToastSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Coding Screen, Four-Round Virtual Onsite, Rejected

First was a coding round. It didn't seem too hard, basically one map and one loop, and it was a question I'd seen on the forum. After that came the long, stinky virtual onsite. System design: this was also on the forum. It's basically designing a restaurant seat reservation system. I'd suggest looking at Alex Xu's book, which has something similar, and then summarizing it yourself. This round was…

RejectedOnsite0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Data Platform Loop, Rejected After the Final System Design Round

I think the team I interviewed for was data platform. A recruiter reached out because I had related experience a few years ago. From other posts I used to think the problem solving round and the coding round were different, but after going through it they feel like essentially the same thing. Netflix's interview process is very long, and different teams probably test different things, so you need…

RejectedOnsite0
AppleSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

Great Feedback Despite Fumbling C++ Trivia

I mass-applied online, and 3 days later a recruiter picked me up; the team I was interviewing with was a pretty good match. The first round went straight into a tech interview. I started with a self-introduction and a brief chat about my resume, no very technical questions there. Then it moved into coding. No algorithms - they used their own custom question, and I was allowed to use AI. Basically…

Technical Screen0
GoogleData Scientist
Sep 2026

An Unexpected Forecasting Question and a Fast Offer Timeline

I signed Google's offer a couple of days ago, though I still have a few other issues to resolve. I'm sharing my interview experience and preparation package, and hoping I can start smoothly. First round Stats: Questions about p-values, simple linear regression, confidence intervals, and similar topics. Data: Compare two vendors' models. There are similar questions in other interview reports. Seco…

OfferOnsite0

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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