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Interview experiences

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Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — 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…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Six Onsite Rounds That Felt Like Six Different Companies
Six rounds, written for people as confused as I was. One thing I only understood after the whole process: this company hires by team, so each team sets its own bar and writes its own questions — which means whatever interview experience you find here for this company might be less useful than you'd hope. Over my six rounds, the six interviewers were different enough in style that it felt like six…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Straight-to-Code Phone Screen, Multi-Family Unit Conversion Graph in Java
I had prepped for a resume deep dive or BQ, but the moment it started, without a word, we went straight into the problem. It's been a long time since I had such a pure interview. It was a variant of LC 3535 (unit conversion), which I'd also seen in an earlier interview report. The difference is that there's more than one family of unit conversions, e.g. temperature is one series and length is ano…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three-Day Onsite Full of Behavioral Questions, Then Ghosted
I got contacted by HR on LinkedIn — the team is based in Austin. The phone screen was with the hiring manager. Two questions, neither of which needed to actually run — you just had to talk through your approach. Not straight off LeetCode, but roughly LeetCode easy level. I interviewed after only a few days of grinding problems, and I still passed, so don't stress about it too much. The onsite was…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Phone Screens, Failed on the Socket Message Round
Two rounds of phone interviews, done on two separate days. The first half of Apple's phone screens is always a behavioral question, which I thought was pretty distinctive. The first round was with an older engineer, kind of serious and not big on smiling, but you could tell he was a senior engineer. The question was to design a hit counter that aggregates how many hits happened in the past 5 minu…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Phone Screens Then a Four-Round Onsite
Phone Screen 1: Coding — Implement Hit Counter Implement a Hit Counter that records the time of each request and can query how many hits happened in the last 5 minutes, i.e. within 300 seconds. Main interface: hit(timestamp) records a request getHits(timestamp) returns the number of requests in the past 300 seconds You can use a queue, or a circular buffer aggregated by second. The focus is on ho…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer interview: onsite assignment and presentation
Recruiter outreach moved quickly into a multi-step process that felt smooth even though it was complex. I went through several rounds with different interviewers, each focused on how I would operate in the role rather than on curveballs. The HR touchpoints clearly explained what each stage would test. I had an onsite-style experience with an assignment and a presentation at the end, which made th…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer interview: technical depth and uncomfortable tone
The overall cycle was technically heavy and thorough. I had multiple rounds with mostly professional, fair questions about heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics. I was expected to show understanding even when the questions became specific. Two rounds felt different. Those interviewers kept adding follow-ups until they found something I could not answer, and some questions required de…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer interview: timing, circuits, and coding under pressure
The process was long and kept expanding. I had multiple roughly one-hour interviews, and the volume itself made it intense. Technical questions covered setup and hold timing, transistor and diode behavior, logic reasoning, and at least one coding round with medium LeetCode-style problems such as string compression and an LRU cache. The mix of coding and hardware-timing questions tested both reaso…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer interview: verification and timing closure
The process began with a short phone call where I was walked through the overall structure. The later rounds centered on my resume and projects, then moved straight into hardware verification and design. The technical range ran from basic material to SVA constraints, UVM, and handshake-style interactions. A later round was even more focused on code and timing logic. We covered DFT fundamentals, e…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software Engineer interview with a full-day final round of eight conversations
The interview cycle was organized but intense. I had four rounds overall, and the final one was a full day with around eight separate interviews running back to back. There were a lot of technical and behavioral questions, and the main demand was sustained focus. Before that full-day round, I had conversations about my background and projects. They started with my CV, then moved into targeted tec…
Interview experiences · Apple
Apple Software QA Engineer Interview Experience — Accessories Team and a Final Coding Rejection
HR phone screen: Some questions about my immigration status. They pointed out that the job had to be onsite in San Diego, though the interviews could take place in Cupertino. The second round was with the hiring manager. We discussed my current work and projects, then my previous QA experience: benchmarking and regression, reducing the false-failure rate, optimizing HPC resource usage, and reduci…
Interview experiences · Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience — A 45-Minute Screen and a Transactional Key-Value Store Question
HR reached out to me on LinkedIn, and we scheduled the first phone call. HR gave a quick overview of the company and emphasized how intense the work culture is there. HR made it clear that the next round would normally be a one-hour interview, but explained that because the company valued efficiency and speed, they were only giving me 45 minutes. Then we scheduled the first technical phone screen…
Interview experiences · Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience — Aggressive Interruptions on a Coding Phone Screen
HR call: Two different HR people reached out to me. It was basically background chat. The first HR felt like they came out of a frat, very flippant, and asked me this kind of dumb question about why I'd choose to accept a return offer and go back to a certain company as a full-time employee. The second one asked what I wanted out of my next job, and then asked to schedule the interview right ther…
Interview experiences · Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience — an LRU-Based Event Scheduler Screen
HR reached out to me on LinkedIn, and we scheduled a round right away. Not a tag question. Say you have a job scheduler that processes events. The input is a timeout value and a stream of events, and you need to figure out which events time out. Events come in three modes: start, end, and ping. A ping updates an event's status, and if the time between an event's last update and the current time e…
Interview experiences · Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience — An Unclear Car-Location API and Binary-Search Hints
This might have been a new question, though I'd only read about ten interview reports. I'd definitely never seen this one. I don't know the result yet, but I didn't finish, so I'm sure this is a rejection report. The main issue was some domain knowledge. I couldn't quickly step back from it, and wasted a lot of time. The interview guidance was also a bit off. I said, "Couldn't this use recursion?…
Interview experiences · Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience: group discussion, system design, and AI coding
After a recruiter call, I had a 45-minute online coding interview. It was a direct technical checkpoint, and after I cleared it, I was invited to the Sunnyvale office for an onsite loop. The onsite included a group discussion, a system-design conversation, an AI coding segment, and a final discussion. It felt structured and professional. They seemed to be looking at how I reasoned, how I communic…
Interview experiences · Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience — Real-Time 3D Playback Design, Then a 2-Hour AI-Assisted Build
A 30-minute panel. It starts with a self-introduction, but the intro itself isn't the point. The main thing is that you need to explain why you're interested in the company's mission, so look up the mission statement on their website beforehand and talk about it. System design, 45 minutes. It was to build a real-time 3D playback system given logs of data. It's the toy-car modeling question that h…
Interview experiences · Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition Software Engineer Interview Experience — Recursion Blocked in Favor of a Stack
The question was a new one I hadn't seen before — roughly, implement an in-memory key-value store that supports transactions. Your system needs to process a series of commands that assign values to variables, print variable values, and manage transactional blocks. The tricky part is that you can assign to a variable that was already assigned before entering the transaction. My first instinct was…
Interview experiences · Applied Materials
Applied Materials Software Engineer interview experience
The stages were fairly clear, but waiting between them felt heavy. I started with a recruiter call, then had an HR conversation about motivation, followed by an onsite interview. During the onsite, I completed a technical portion and met the person responsible for maintenance. HR returned with a final decision and feedback afterward. What I remember most is how long the time after the interviews…
Interview experiences · Applied Materials
Applied Materials Software Engineer Interview Experience: Next-morning invite and limited preparation
I received an invitation for the next morning and barely had time to prepare. The interview itself was simple, with light questions that did not require much practice, but I had not had time to collect my thoughts and messed up my responses. It began as a quick background conversation about my background and why I wanted the company. Then there was a technical review with LeetCode questions. One…
Interview experiences · Applied Materials
Applied Materials Software Engineer Interview Experience: theoretical DSA and same-day coding
I first went through a technical round and a behavioral round. The technical part covered standard DSA and OOP, but it was a theoretical discussion of systems-design concepts rather than live coding. The behavioral conversation felt smooth and not stressful, and the questions were familiar. A couple of weeks later, I had two focused sessions on the same day. The first was a medium LeetCode-style…
Interview experiences · Applied Materials
Applied Materials Software Engineer interview: unexpected technical onsite
I did this interview partly for the experience, and it turned strange quickly. The first round was on Zoom. The interviewer had the wrong resume and accused me of lying about my experience before realizing the mix-up. He corrected it professionally, but the moment was tense. For the final onsite, I was told it would not be technical, which was fine because I was comfortable with LeetCode. When I…
Interview experiences · Applied Materials
Applied Materials Software Engineer interview with a calm technical and behavioral process
I had a calmer, low-stress process overall because the people running it were accommodating. The recruiter and interviewers were helpful, and the process felt like it was moving forward instead of dragging. I didn't feel anxious as it went on, and the tone matched how they treated me as an applicant. The interviews began with the usual conversation about my background, why I wanted the role, and…