Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

4437 stories

Likes earn the author +10 XP for the first 3 likes each day

New RelicBackend Engineer
Sep 2026

String Compression, Longest Increasing Path, and a Kafka Trace-Grouping Design

Question 1: Implement a method that does basic string compression by counting consecutive repeated characters. If the compressed string is not shorter than the original string, return the original string. Discuss time complexity and space complexity Discuss edge cases Discuss code optimization Question 2: Longest Increasing Path in a Matrix. You can only move in four directions (up, down, left, r…

Onsite0
AuroraMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Grilled on Using LLMs to Drive Self-Driving Cars

I interviewed with Aurora for an MLE role. Overall the questions were pretty middle-of-the-road and not really that hard. Maybe I just wasn't prepared enough and didn't manage to wow them. The senior package can only go up to about 500k at most, which maybe isn't all that attractive either. The question that came up the most in the interviews was how to use LLMs in autonomous driving, how to use…

Technical Screen0
AirbnbSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Four-Level Banking System OA, Stuck on Level 3 at 440 Points

Level 1: Basic banking operations. Needs to support: Level 2: Top Spenders Requirement: rank accounts based on the total value of outgoing transactions Adds something like: Level 3: Scheduled Payments. The system needs to support: schedule payment accept payment The biggest trap here is the timestamp execution order. It's not just "store a record when schedule_payment is called" and that's it. Ev…

Online Assessment0
CrestaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI-Assisted Coding Round: Build a Flight-Booking Chat Agent in Python

You get an api.md doc plus an agent_starter.py file, and you have to use AI assistance to implement an AI Agent that searches for and books flights. The format is a chat dialog. Note: the language has to be Python, and you need to set up the whole project in your own IDE, so make sure you can actually run Python locally first. They'll also give you OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENAI_BASE_URL, and FLIGHT_API_…

Onsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Added Sep 2026

Article Vote Tracker

Got the Article Vote Tracker question. Part 1 involved adding articles, recording up/down votes, detecting vote flips, and returning the last 3 unique flipped articles. The follow-up asked how to handle a very large flip history. The key optimization is to maintain only the last 3 unique flipped article IDs per user instead of storing the complete history. I completed Part 1 but did not proceed t…

Technical Screen1
TemuSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen with Spiral Matrix and a Blocker Follow-up

I just finished my Temu phone screen. First round (coding): The problem was a variant of a 2D matrix problem. Part one: given an m x n matrix, output all the values in the matrix in spiral order (clockwise, from the outside in). It's a classic, similar to LC 54 Spiral Matrix. Follow-up: what if the matrix has some blockers (obstacles)? During the traversal, whenever you hit a blocker you have to…

Technical Screen0
Ro.CoApplied AI EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

One-Hour Take-home on Aptora, Rejected the Next Day

Ro.co: there are basically no interview reports for this company on the forum, so I'm sharing a data point. It's based in NYC, a telehealth startup that's been around for several years, and its main competitor is Hims & Hers. I interviewed for a Senior Applied AI Engineer position. My background is traditional SWE, and I applied blindly online. I talked to the recruiter and the HM separately firs…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
Capital OneSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Power Day with Case, Behavioral, Coding and System Design

I just finished the C1 power day. There are already plenty of OA write-ups on the forum so I won't go into that, I'll mainly talk about the four power day rounds as a reference for anyone interviewing later. The four rounds were case, behavioral, coding, and system design. The case was the virtual card number one, which someone has posted about here before. First we talked about the benefits and…

In progressOnsite0
WhatnotSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One-Hour Karat, Two of Three Questions Finished

Karat interview, one hour. I finished two questions. For the third one I explained my approach but ran out of time to finish writing it. Question 1 Given a store map with different products and a shopping_list, find the minimum number of times needed to buy all the items. Question 2 Given a graph representing a map, with some attractions on it and travel times between the attractions. Several car…

Technical Screen0
SalesforceSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Two OA Questions: String Segmentation and Power-of-Two Operations

Question 1: Minimum Segments with No Repeated Characters Given a string s, you need to perform the following operation exactly once, then compute the minimum number of non-overlapping, non-empty substrings with no repeated characters that the string can be split into: Choose any lowercase English letter, and delete every occurrence of it from the string. Constraints: 1 <= |s| <= 2 * 10^5 String s…

Online Assessment0
LinkedInData Scientist
Sep 2026

Five Onsite Rounds from Course Data to Experimentation

My LinkedIn onsite had five rounds in total: Data presentation I was given two tables. One showed the current number of LinkedIn Learning courses in each category, and the other showed the number of courses and participants over time. I had to analyze them myself, then make slides and present. SQL + Python For SQL, I was given two experiment tables. One was a cohort table with users, their experi…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Virtual Onsite Rescheduled a Dozen Times, GPU Credit Coding Round

First, let me vent about how chaotic this company is. It was originally scheduled as 4 rounds in one day. Then it got rescheduled a dozen-plus times and ended up as 4 days with 1 round each. The interviewer also got swapped 7-8 times... On top of that, the interviewer didn't know what I'd been asked in the phone screen, so the question they gave me was the same one as my phone screen, and then th…

Onsite0
StravaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Phone Screen: Climb Detection on Elevation Samples, Then Tolerating Partial Descents

Climb Detection Given an array of elevation samples taken at regular intervals, return the [startIndex, endIndex] of the first climb. Return [] if no climb exists. Part 1 — Strict Climb A climb: Starts when elevation begins increasing. Can stay flat. Cannot decrease. Ends at the highest elevation reached during the climb. Example: [3, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 5, 10, 10, 7, 15] → [4, 10] Part 2 — T…

Technical Screen0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Strong Coding, Closed Out as a Borderline Case After the Virtual Onsite

Overall, I just did my best (shrug). Phone screen: Coding — "infection," 3/5. I got stuck on a bug on the third question and spent about 15 minutes debugging it. System design: chess. Interviewed on a Thursday, heard back that I passed by the following Monday. Virtual Onsite: Coding — IP address, 3.5/5. I got to the IPv6 part of the question and was hunched over looking up how to write a BigInteg…

RejectedOnsite0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Interviewer Couldn't Follow My One-Pass DFS Trick

Two questions. The first was to merge an n-ary tree by key -- only nodes that share the same key get merged. It's solvable with DFS. Make sure to ask about the corner cases up front, like whether the root keys are even the same. The second question was similar in spirit. The interviewer completely did not understand this problem. I wrote out the following conversion formula, which lets you solve…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AppleSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Resume Deep Dive, Then a Plant-Poisoning Grid Problem

I think the team was TV. It was supposed to be a hiring manager round with one interviewer, but a different interviewer joined instead. He said we would be writing code, but then he suddenly started a deep dive into my resume and we talked for 20 minutes. Then he moved on to the problem, which was either whatever "Jiujiusi" is or plant poisoning. 0 is healthy and 1 is poisoned. If a healthy cell…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

SDE II Phone Screen and a No-Backtrack, No-Turns Maze Problem

SDE II 09/02 Online Assessment 09/16 Phone Screen 20 minutes of deep-diving into my resume — tech stack choices, trade-offs, business logic, which part I was specifically responsible for, plus 2 Leadership Principles. 40 minutes of coding. I couldn't find the original problem online — it was a BFS reachability problem with direction vectors. X means you can't walk there, 0 means you can. Constrai…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
CrestaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

System Design Round: Build an Eval Platform for AI Agents

System design round They have you design an eval system to evaluate the results of an Agent using different models, e.g. tool usage, response speed, plus testing different system prompts, that kind of thing. The original question is below: > Design a system for evaluating AI agents. Users of the system are going to be teams developing AI agents, e.g. agents which automatically analyze contact cen…

Onsite0
OpenAISoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Virtual Onsite Design Round: Sora With One GPU per Task

Same as the coding round, the interviewer pulled out the question from my phone screen. But the interviewer was really friendly, and he also told me an important piece of information: right now the company has interviewers pick the power grid question as their first choice, so everyone should prepare that one more. Later it switched to designing Sora, and a pretty useful constraint was that each…

In progressOnsite0
CitadelSoftware EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

Merging K Timestamped Price Feeds into a Running Price in Technical Round 3

Citadel SWE intern technical interview. The interviewer was from Citadel Securities. Problem description: You are given K data streams (feeds), and each feed is already sorted by timestamp in ascending order. Each event has two fields: a timestamp and a price delta. Requirement: merge the events from all the feeds in time order, and after processing each event, output the current cumulative absol…

Technical Screen0

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.

Share your experience to earn XP