Oracle Software Engineer Interview Experience — Trie Question, Five-Round Virtual Onsite, and an Unprofessional HR Twist

Phone screen (1 round): the interviewer ran the call (I remember his title was something like "senior engineer," though the way it was phrased sounded more like "elderly engineer"). He gave a trie + backtracking question. The prompt: the user types in a string prefix, and you return the 5 most similar existing words. You need to implement two APIs: a. add a word; b. search for a word. If fewer than 5 matching words exist, return all of them.

Virtual onsite (5 rounds): two coding rounds (one question each), one BQ round, one system design round, and one bar raiser round.

Coding 1: you're given two arrays — one represents file values, the other represents whether that file is decrypted. There's also a constant input k representing the maximum number of files you can unlock. Constraints: you can't decrypt more than k files, and the unlocked files must be contiguous (a sub-array). Find the maximum sum of all decrypted files' values after unlocking (only decrypted files' values count toward the sum). k is both the max number of files you can decrypt and the max length of the sub-array, and you can only perform this unlock operation once.

Coding 2: merge intervals.

BQ / bar raiser: the usual behavioral storytelling.

System design: how would you deploy a gen AI model (the focus was on scalability + availability).

Final feedback was that they felt my enthusiasm for oncall/operations wasn't strong enough and my experience wasn't quite enough, but overall the discussion still let me pass.

During the process HR was extremely unprofessional — before the process even started, without talking to me first, HR went straight to the hiring manager and said I wasn't interested in the position... It only got sorted out when the manager found me on LinkedIn to confirm directly.

The initial package number they gave was honestly hard to believe: 215 = 169 + (220/4).

Update (2025-08-09): HR suddenly said that right now only Nashville and Austin have headcount. Nashville is 5 days RTO, Austin is 3 days RTO a week. Only Nashville comes with a 10k pre-tax relocation allowance. After that, the best number they could offer was 152 + 210 (40...