Interview Experiences

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

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4437 stories

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SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two Phone Screens, DAG Coding and a Control Plane Design

Two phone screens, one coding and one system design. The coding question was a "privilege" problem that is already on the forum (the DAG allow/disallow letters one). The difference in the requirements was that each node passes down its own final state to its children, instead of passing allow and disallow separately. I propagated in topological order, and at each step every node computes its late…

Technical Screen0
OktaSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One-Hour Phone Screen with BQ and a CodeSignal Pagination API

Okta's interviews feel like they vary a lot by team. I read a few other write-ups and they were all pretty different. From the recruiter to the interviewers, the company culture seemed pretty good and everyone was nice. If I get rejected, it just means I wasn't good enough. Anyways, posting this for whoever interviews next. My phone screen was 1 hour: 25 minutes of BQ, 30 minutes of coding, 5 min…

Technical Screen0
AmazonFrontend Engineer
Sep 2026

One DSA Round, Two Mediums, Rejected

I applied through a LinkedIn post for SDE I (Frontend). HR contacted me over a call and we discussed the further rounds. Round 1 (PS-DS Round) (1hr) Two DSA medium questions were asked, and I was able to solve both of them within the time limit (~40 mins). The interviewer was helpful and provided hints. Q1. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree Q2. Ones and Zeroes Explain brute force, th…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
C3 AIData ScientistIntern
Sep 2026

ML Multiple Choice and Production Request Scheduling

Question 1: Vanishing Gradient Which of the following is NOT a potential solution to the vanishing gradient problem in a deep neural network? Adding skip connections to the neural network architecture Using a different activation function like ReLU Raising the learning rate Adding Batch Normalization between layers Question 2: Boosting Classification For the classification problem, Boosting is wi…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI Coding, Reconciliation, and a Debugger That Would Not Run

AI coding: It's the rule parser problem from the forum. I used the Opus model and kept talking with the interviewer the whole way through. Honestly, in the moment I couldn't fully understand what the AI wrote either (a lot of the time I have to read Claude's code over and over before I get it, I'm just not that good), but I got the feeling the interviewer was also only half following and just nod…

RejectedOnsite0
Frontend Engineer
Sep 2026

A Multi-Company Search Ending in a Profound Offer

The author relays a friend’s 2026 frontend interview search across multiple companies. Reported exercises included notification systems, live comments, typeahead interfaces, forms, file editing, and collaborative documents. The account contrasts companies’ emphasis on visual fidelity, full-stack knowledge, project management, and system design. The friend found Databricks slow to schedule, apprec…

OfferOnsite0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One-Hour AI-Assisted Phone Screen on Camel Cards

The phone screen was one hour, and the question was one of the ones people have already posted about: Camel Cards. I picked the option where the AI helps write the code. A hand has 5 cards, and there are 7 hand types in total, each with its own weight, ordered from strongest to weakest. Part one: first I read the problem and made clear that I would create 1 abstract class HandType and 1 class Han…

In progressTechnical Screen0
MixpanelData Scientist
Sep 2026

Four Retention SQL Questions in a 45-Minute Screen

Straight to the useful stuff. My Mixpanel Data Scientist phone interview was a SQL screen, around 45 minutes, with someone from the DS team. Table structures, restated as I understood them, roughly like this: users: user_id, signup_date, plan_type, ... events: user_id, event_ts, ... There were four questions, each building on the previous one, all about retention analysis. Q1: How many users had…

In progressTechnical Screen0
VoleonMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

A Time-Series Pipeline Coding Screen

After recruiter outreach, the author agreed to interview with Voleon and reports being rejected after a 90-minute machine-learning coding session. The exercise involved a pipeline with roughly five tasks and a CSV dataset containing time-series observations. The author remembers debugging, changing model parameters, running results, and extending the pipeline for inference, but not the remaining…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Four Rounds with Detailed Behavioral Questions

The author describes four Amazon virtual-onsite interviews for an SDE2 role, each combining behavioral discussion with technical work. The technical topics were dependency ordering and selective reruns, a high-volume inventory-update service, an extensible document-search library, and merging timestamp-ordered event streams without loading everything into memory. Behavioral questions examined inv…

Onsite0
AMDSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

GPU Systems, Inference, and an Offer

The author reports receiving an AMD GPU software engineering offer after interviews for a Toronto/Markham team. Recruiter outreach led to an initial screen and an extended hiring-manager conversation. An in-person onsite followed roughly two weeks after availability was requested, and the offer arrived about three weeks after that visit. The four onsite sessions covered inference systems, agent a…

OfferOnsite0
Aim Intelligent MachineSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

A Merge Intervals Question and a Curveball Follow-up

This is a startup building autonomous excavators. I felt like I wasn't really a match for it, but a recruiter reached out, and since the job market is rough right now, I figured I'd use it as practice. The role is senior, and they have an office in Bellevue. I first got a hardware guy who spent a while asking why I was considering their company and stuff like that. I told him there wasn't really…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
IBMSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Coding Phone Screen on an IDE Function Signature Matcher

The task is to implement an IDE-style function signature lookup engine. It has two core APIs: Register a function (register): store the function name, its list of parameter types, and whether it takes variadic arguments. Query for matches (find_matches): given a list of argument types for a call, return the names of all functions that can be legally called with them. Core interface definition: Th…

Technical Screen0
ByteDanceSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Sep 2026

TikTok E-commerce First Round: Tic-Tac-Toe Game-Over Check Pushed Down to O(1)

Team: e-commerce Interview language: Chinese Round: first round It went straight into coding. I had GPT reconstruct the coding question, so just bear with it: The problem is a modified version of LeetCode 348 Design Tic-Tac-Toe. The difference is that it doesn't ask you to design a TicTacToe class and move(). Instead you're given the current n x n board directly and you implement GameOver(board)…

In progressTechnical Screen0
RipplingSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Delivery Billing and Rounding Decisions

The author describes a Rippling recruiter screen followed by an hour-long HackerRank technical interview where AI assistance was encouraged. The recruiter discussed project impact, responsibilities, motivation, AI-tool use, and practical job requirements. The coding exercise tracked delivery costs using driver rates that could change over time. Important requirements included ignoring duplicate d…

Technical Screen0
DRWQuantitative ResearcherNew Grad
Sep 2026

Auto-Rejected Before the OA Deadline Even Hit

I cold-applied online to DRW's US New Grad Quantitative Researcher role. Less than a week after applying, I got an online assessment invite. The email said the OA link would expire in seven days, and there was no other deadline notice anywhere. Then, five days later, I got an email saying I hadn't finished the OA in time, and I was flat-out rejected. But the OA link was still valid, so I went ahe…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment with a Coordinate-Compression Problem and a Debugging Task

One algorithm question, one project question, an AI-coding debug round. Q1: There are infinitely many bags in a row. Each segment [l, r, v] means bags l through r each hold v dollars. Segments do not overlap, and empty bags count as 0. Pick k consecutive bags and find the maximum total amount, mod 1e9+7. Constraints: n <= 2e5, and k and the coordinates go up to 1e9. Similar to LC 3413. Example: k…

Online Assessment0
ConfluentSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

HackerRank, Sudoku, Machine Coding and a DevProd Values Round

Online Assessment A 60-minute HackerRank test with 3 coding problems. Phone Interview (DSA Round) Verify Sudoku (check whether a Sudoku board is valid) Solve Sudoku Machine Coding Round Find word in a list of documents (find a specific word in a list of documents). Find Phrase in the same sequence they appear in list of documents (find a phrase in the list of documents, with the words in the give…

Onsite0
Analytics Engineer
Sep 2026

Entry Numbering and Backfilling a Missing Date Range

I recently had an Analytics Engineer technical screen at a company and encountered a SQL + data pipeline question. Here's the approach. Table structure: entry_uuid | context_uuid | visitor_id | created_at | platform. Users can ask consecutive questions in the same chat/context. Each entry needs an entry_number indicating which entry it is within that context. How do you calculate it? The intervie…

Technical Screen0
AppleData Scientist
Sep 2026

Exploring Employee and Audit Tables with the Hiring Manager

It was a team focused more on internal work. The first round was a technical interview with the hiring manager, and we started solving problems with almost no self-introduction. I have to say Apple's questions were very detailed. It really felt like they were testing technical ability through the work you normally do. I needed to think aloud; they cared a lot about how I understood the data and e…

RejectedTechnical 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.

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