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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Anthropic
Anthropic Staff Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Surprise Extra Round, Then a Downlevel to Senior
Overall the problems weren't hard, but there was a lot of code to write. The phone screen was one round of coding — they asked the file deduplication problem (Q2), done on Replit. The onsite (VO) had 5 rounds total — it was originally supposed to be 4, but they added one more afterward: Round 1, Coding: asked the web crawler question (Q1). The interviewer asked if I'd seen a similar problem befor…
Interview experiences · Apexon
Apexon Software Engineer interview: Java questions and platform assessment
I went to Apexon for a Java-engineer-style interview and waited a long time before it began. When it finally started, it felt rushed and focused on Java fundamentals and fast coding. I solved a problem about printing pairs such as (x, 2x) from an array, then worked with Java Streams to filter and transform strings. I was also asked about daemon threads. The conversation ended abruptly, leaving li…
Interview experiences · Appian
Appian Software Engineer interview: immediate automated rejections
About an hour after I applied online, I received an automatic rejection. I never spoke with anyone at the company, and it did not appear that my resume had been reviewed. The same role kept being reposted. When I tried again later, I received another automatic rejection without a recruiter call. That made the experience feel less like active hiring and more like resume harvesting, at least from m…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple AI/ML Full Stack Engineer Interview Experience — Designing a 200TB Media Data Transfer Pipeline
Question Background The interviewer threw out a fairly open-ended system-design / data-engineering question: You have 200TB of media data (images/videos) that needs to be transferred to compute hosts / a compute cluster for processing (preprocessing, inference, training). How would you design this? There's no standard answer to this one. What it's actually testing is: can you pin down the scope o…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple ASIC Design Verification Engineer Interview Experience — Hardcore Technical From C/C++ to SV/UVM, Almost No Behavioral Questions
Hi everyone! The job search grind is finally over, and I landed the offer I wanted. Along the way I read countless useful posts from people who came before me on this forum, and I learned a lot from them. Today I want to give back and summarize the interview experience and high-frequency topics that I and the friends around me ran into applying for ASIC Design Verification (DV) roles in North Ame…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Data Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected After Two Technical Rounds, But the Nicest Interview Yet
Apple Maps – Metrics Engineering team I'd never heard of this role before either. I looked into it a lot, and it feels kind of like a Data Engineer (Analytics-leaning) role — designing data pipelines for various Apple Maps features and building metrics to measure the app's performance. A recruiter reached out to me, and I went into the interview just to give it a try. I ended up failing, but this…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Data Scientist Interview Experience — a Quick HR Call Just to Schedule the Minicase
Simply put, it was very simple — basically no difficulty at all. We scheduled about an hour, but they actually only asked me three questions: What's your current status? What's your highest degree? When can you schedule the minicase? As long as you answer honestly there's no problem. In the middle, I also asked two questions. My highest degree is a master's, but I couldn't find my undergrad schoo…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Data Scientist Interview Experience — 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…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Full Stack Engineer Interview Experience — React JS and Java Coding Rounds
React JS Coding Round In incognito mode, if you open a site like Amazon.com or Flipkart.com, what are some ways to optimize the page's load speed? Is JavaScript single-threaded or multi-threaded? What is the event loop? Does JS execute top to bottom, or the other way around? If you fetch 10M records via an API in JS and render them in a table in the UI, what problems show up in the UI? How would…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Intern Software Engineer Interview Experience — 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…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Interview Experience — A 45-Minute Technical Screen on Synchronizers and PPA
45 minutes total. It started with introducing the work on my resume — I talked about an IP block I designed myself. While I was talking he kept nodding, and I thought the first round was going pretty smoothly. Then he started asking some technical questions. Since I mentioned different synchronizers partway through, he asked why you'd use different synchronizers (2-stage FF, edge detect, async FI…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Machine Learning Engineer interview: smooth and rushed flows
My smoother interviews began with a technical phone screen, then a comfortable, practical DSA-style round. It included a regression-model critique and a subset-sum-style problem. I had recently worked through similar problems, so those patterns were already familiar. I then had a codebase-style evaluation around PDF evaluation logic. The structure felt familiar because I had previously reviewed t…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Maps Analytics Engineer Interview Experience — Two Technical Rounds, Rejected Despite Glowing Feedback
Apple Maps - Metrics Engineering team I'd honestly never heard of this role before. I looked up a lot of information about it, and it feels kind of like a Data Engineer role with an Analytics focus — designing data pipelines for various Apple Maps features, and designing metrics to measure the app's performance. A recruiter reached out to me, and I went into the interview with a "why not, let's s…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple New Grad Accessories Software QA Engineer Interview Experience — A Reorganization Delay and Onsite Rejection
In the first interview, I talked with HR about the role being in San Diego and confirmed that the role would sponsor my OPT. In the second interview, I talked with the hiring manager about my previous QA projects. [I'd done a year as a QA intern and had basically done all the full-time work once already.] Then I was ghosted for three weeks. After that, they called me back and said a reorganizatio…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple New Grad Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Two Tech Screens, No Feedback on the Reject
One day out of nowhere I got an email from an Apple recruiter about an open position. Since the opportunity was there, I figured I'd interview and see how it went. First round was directly with the hiring manager — we started by chatting through my resume. The team does RAG work, and it's basically an internal group that supports the hardware team as helpers. In the last 20 minutes, they opened u…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience — Aced Every Round, Rejected at Hiring Committee
The behavioral questions were all situational ones — things like what you'd do if a coworker disappeared and stopped doing their work. But it was all pretty relaxed. The interviewer even said he'd already gathered everything he needed. It felt good overall. Coding round 1 was an intervals problem — similar to one I'd seen in a previous report, where you're given a bunch of [start, end] intervals…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Research Scientist Interview Experience — Setting a Retry Threshold to Save iPhone Battery
I recently interviewed for a Research Scientist role at Apple, on a team that works on battery power. Here's the question they asked. The team's core mission is optimizing iPhone battery life and power usage. They found that when users are on Apple Music, they often hit network fluctuations where the app can't get the audio data. At that point the system faces a choice: The disconnect could be a…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Passed Five Rounds but Lost to an Internal Hire, Plus Coupang, Databricks, and Mistral AI Along the Way
Background: 5.5 years of experience, all of it at second-tier companies doing infra. Goal: mainly looking to move into AI-related work. Target level is Google L5 equivalent or above. I'm not afraid of a heavy workload, I like healthy competition. Timeline: started grinding problems and sending out resumes from early February, and by early June had gradually started getting offers and wrapped up i…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Senior+ Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Same-Day Rejection
The team is under iCloud and mainly works on time series and operations research optimization. The first round was a resume deep dive with the hiring manager. They asked how to decide which cloud storage tier to use for a user's files, such as AWS S3 versus AWS S3 Glacier, since different tiers have different costs. It was essentially a classification problem: predicting those files' access proba…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer interview: CMOS logic and architecture reasoning
After a recruiter chat, I moved through structured rounds that felt focused and practical. The first round asked me to explain core flow stages end to end, tying each stage's inputs to its purpose. The questions soon became more specific, including level shifting, isolation cells, and how CMOS logic works for an inverter. The virtual onsite was about how I approached an engineering problem, not j…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer interview: design challenge decision
HR outreach quickly led to an hour-long hiring-manager conversation about my background, technical topics, and design. I did not feel especially strong in those answers, but I still advanced to a design challenge. The cycle ended after I submitted that work. I was rejected after the design challenge, without a long back-and-forth. What surprised me was how quickly the process moved from conversat…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — 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…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Phone Screen Rejection After a Bug-Free LRU
AES team. The role was posted by someone on the forum (I don't know whether they were the hiring manager), but I applied on my own, and the recruiter reached out very quickly. The phone screen was with one interviewer. For the first thirty minutes it was behavioral questions plus a project deep dive, and I got affirmed on all sorts of things. After that came LRU, bug free, and it ran with the rig…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Poker System Design, OOD Rock-Paper-Scissors, and Two Hiring Manager Rounds
Coding 1 Design a poker card system, implementing two core methods: shuffle and order. The order method needs to return a sorted list of cards by suit and rank — for example starting with 3 of Clubs, 3 of Diamonds, 3 of Hearts, 3 of Spades, and so on up through Ace. Coding 2 First a relatively simple LeetCode DFS (depth-first search) question, followed by an OOD (object-oriented design) segment w…