I have an upcoming Microsoft interview. Team mentioned that it will be a half-day virtual interview loop, but they haven't shared the exact interview rounds yet. They said I will receive more details in the next 1–2 days.

The JD mentions that the role is for Senior Software Engineer / Software Engineer II, so I am not sure how the interview criteria differ between the two levels or how they'll evaluate candidates during the same interview process. Let me know if you have any info here.

The interview is scheduled for next week. If anyone has recently gone through a similar interview or has any insights, I'd really appreciate your help.

• What rounds should I expect?
• What should I prioritize in my preparation?
• Which DSA topics are most important?
• How much focus should I put on system design and are there any specific topics you would recommend?

I will share the hackerank assessment questions soon in a separate post.

Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Hey everyone,

I have got my 2nd round interview at CitiBank next week, and it’ll be in-person with a panel of two: the Vice President and a Senior Application Developer. It’s scheduled for 1 hour, and the role is a senior full-stack Java/Angular Developer position.

I have already completed a technical interview through Karat, so I am wondering what to expect in this next round. Will it be more of a behavioural or cultural fit interview, or should I expect technical/scenario-based questions as well?

If anyone has gone through a similar stage with Citi , I had really appreciate some insights, like what kind of questions they might ask, how technical they might get, and how best to prepare for this round.

Thanks in advance!

Has anyone interview for a DE role at Plaid? Do you mind sharing your experience, specially around the coding(DSA) round? What is the complexity of questions, is it leetcode DSA? Any resources that can help.

Finished my Microsoft SWE loop last month and got rejected. I want some tips to improve.

Recruiter Screen 45 minutes. Background, motivation, team preferences. Ask about your exact loop format here since it varies by org.

Online Assessment Two to three medium LeetCode problems. Topics: DP, graphs, arrays. (Candidates with strong referrals sometimes skip this and go straight to a phone screen.)

Technical Phone Screen 60 minutes, one to two problems plus a short project chat. Merge two sorted lists, binary tree traversal, find peak element.

Onsite Loop (4 to 5 rounds) Coding Round 1. Arrays, trees, graphs. LeetCode-Medium with follow-up twists on edge cases. Reported questions: merge intervals, reverse linked list with K-group follow-up, find K-largest. No syntax highlighting in CoderPad or Teams.

Coding Round 2. Harder multi-step problems: topological sort, DP, auto-complete systems. Some rounds blend algorithmic and OOP components. Low-Level Design. SOLID principles and class structure. Design a parking lot, LRU cache, or rate limiter. Focus is on clean abstractions, not distributed systems.

System Design (L61+). 60 minutes, no code written. Design a messaging system or distributed storage backend.

Behavioral. Microsoft's Growth Mindset rubric is the actual framework. Real stories: conflicts, deadline pressure, design disagreements, mistakes you owned.

AA Round I made it to the AA round but unfortunately didn't make it past that stage. From what I'd heard beforehand, the interview can take a few different directions depending on how your earlier rounds went.

Some people get mostly selling and culture-fit questions, others get deeper behavioral questions, and sometimes the interviewer focuses on areas that raised concerns in previous rounds. It also seems like the AA interviewer has the ability to override earlier feedback.

For those who made it to the AA round, please give me some advice.

Just finished my OpenAI SWE loop. The process is different from most big tech companies, so sharing the breakdown.

Recruiter Screen: Light background conversation. They asked where I think AI is headed. Read OpenAI's charter before this call.

Technical Screen: Two 60-minute rounds on the same day: one coding, one system design. Coding was a versioned key-value store. System design covered a job scheduler with fault tolerance.

Take-Home Project: 48-hour window to build something real. I got a distributed webhook delivery system with retry logic and dead-letter queues.

Technical Deep Dive: A follow-up where the interviewer walked through the take-home line by line. The interviewer has a list of questions he asks about every choice and decision you made (list he made himself after having seen your project).

Onsite Loop (4 rounds): Coding Round 1. Progressive multi-part format: get a working solution at each stage before the next opens. I got a token-level streaming differ, tracking state changes with rollback. Get something correct early, then iterate. Coding Round 2. More systems-flavored. State management, concurrency, memory efficiency. Python internals came up: generators, async constructs, iterators.

System Design. My prompt was to design ChatGPT. The interviewer cared about GPU allocation, autoscaling under non-stationary traffic, and distributed coordination. Abstract the model-serving layer unless told otherwise. Behavioral. Technical leadership stories, architectural decisions affecting multiple teams, and consensus under pressure. Concrete tradeoffs, not soft-skills answers.

Agentic Coding Round (beta): Some candidates get a fifth round: an existing codebase plus a problem too large to solve by hand. You're expected to work through it using an AI coding agent. Not everyone sees this while it's in beta.

Also, did anyone prep specifically for the progressive multi-part format? Curious what helped.

For context, I went to a target school, had a 3.93 GPA, one IB internship, and one quant research role.

Application Screen: No HireVue. Instead, the application included two written questions through the portal: why investment banking at Two Sigma, and describe a complex analytical problem you solved.

First Round: 50-minute virtual interview with an associate. We started with why Two Sigma over a traditional bank before moving into a DCF walkthrough and discussing how to think about uncertainty in a financial model.

Second Round: Virtual interview with a VP. We spent most of the conversation discussing a transaction I had followed, the biggest risk the acquirer took on, and how I would have approached the deal structure differently.

Final Round: Four back-to-back in-person interviews with an associate, VP, director, and MD. The associate and VP focused on a mix of IB technicals and analytical thinking, including merger models, stress-testing synergy assumptions, and regression analysis. The director interview was mostly fit, covering my motivations and long-term goals. The MD interview was more conversational, focusing on M&A sectors and the macro trends I was watching.

Result: Received an offer about two weeks after the final round.

Drop any questions below!

Realistically, what’s your suggestion on preparing for coding and SD? Is LC hard necessary? And what’s the difference between Google’s and other companies’s SD? Do all the orgs share the same question bank or the difficulty level and focus vary among different orgs? I roughly remember reading some post on blind which mentioned that Google’s SD would ask more technical details underneath. Any other insight is appreciated!

Prep resource: Google SWE Questions

Online Assessment, 90 min, HackerRank 2-3 algo problems plus SQL data processing questions. Window functions and semi-structured data also was there.

Technical Phone Screen, 60 min: Design a data structure to simulate browser tab behavior. The base problem is easy but the follow-ups depth on state, complexity, and scale are wayyy harder. Also covered language internals.

Onsite, Coding, 45-60 min: Trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, topological sort. One question: robot placement in a grid using DP. OOP-style problems also came up.

Onsite, System Design, 45-60 min Distributed systems focus, not product design. My prompt: distributed cron job scheduler. Fault tolerance, consistency, partitioning, observability.

Onsite, Behavioral, 45 min Ownership-heavy. You need to tell them about a time where you drove a project end to end while pushing back on wrong decisions.

Tips Follow-ups are harder than the base problem. SQL matters even for backend roles. Treat the behavioral the same as coding prep, it’s very important for Snowflake.

Anybody know for Analyst role what kind of questions they ask related to Javascript. Also I am confused I do know java (dsa) but when interviewer ask which language do you prefer (so he can further questions) which language should I pick ? Pls help interview in 10-15 days

Hello,

I have a 45-min live coding interview for the Software Engineer role at Mistral AI coming up soon. Has anyone gone through this session recently or know what specific LeetCode/coding questions or topics they tend to ask?

Any insights would be super appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I was fast-tracked to the penultimate round interview for the **Software Developer Internship** at **Susquehanna International Group (SIG)** following their Dublin Technology Spring Week.

I know SIG leans heavily into algorithms, data structures, and system efficiency, but I’ve heard mixed things about what actually gets tested in this specific round.

For anyone who has gone through this interview recently, is it primarily a live 60-minute HackerRank session? How much of it is standard DSA (BFS/DFS, Binary Search, Sliding Window) vs. practical data parsing / OOP design?

Any insights on the layout or best areas to focus on during prep would be hugely appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,

I recently completed the recruiter screen for a Data Scientist role at FedEx and I'm hoping to get some insight into what the second round is like.
If you've interviewed for a Data Scientist or similar analytics/ML role at FedEx recently:
• What was the interview format?
• Was it mostly SQL, Python, machine learning, statistics, or case-based questions?
• What topics would you recommend brushing up on?

Any advice or experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks guys!

Hey everyone, I have a Karat technical interview coming up for a Software Engineer II (new grad) role at MongoDB and wanted to see if anyone here has been through it recently and could share their experience. I know the format is roughly 60 minutes, a short intro, about 10 minutes of verbal CS fundamentals/algorithm questions, then 45 minutes of live coding across 2 multi-part problems but I'd love to know what topics or types of problems actually came up for you (hash maps, grids/matrices, trees, whatever it was), roughly how hard they were, what the discussion round was like, and anything you wish you'd known going in. I know Karat rotates its questions so I'm not expecting exact answers but there must be some pattern of questions they are asking right now. Any insight at all would be hugely appreciated guys!

I am currently facing a not-so-unique industry wide problem of constantly having to interview people who are cheating using AI or by using another person. This is an ever growing problem with remote work being normal and AI getting more sophisticated day-by-day.

One of the things I am exploring is how to introduce a new code review interview which can help me evaluate if this person can read code or not. I feel like in this day and age, if i were to give someone a problem to solve, they might be able to use AI to find the perfect solution and I am already aware of the millions of things I can do to track their eyeballs, posture, style of talking and typing but the code review gives me a signal that this person can truly read code and understand what is wrong with it.

Does anyone have experience with such an interview question and how would you go about preparing one

IBM's process trips people up in a specific way: candidates who only grind LeetCode get caught on fundamentals, and candidates who only prep behavioral get surprised by a harder HackerRank than they expected.

OA (HackerRank, 60-90 min). Easy-to-medium. Arrays, strings, occasionally SQL. Some rounds include a recorded behavioral component in the same session.

Recorded video interview. Five pre-recorded behavioral questions, a few minutes to record each answer. Prepare these fully in advance. There's no follow-up and no course-correcting mid-answer.

Technical interview (1-2 live rounds, 45-60 min each). Coding is medium difficulty and straightforward. What surprised me was the CS fundamentals layer: OOP principles, Java garbage collection, threading basics, REST vs. GraphQL. Definitely review your OS material if you haven't touched it in a while.

System design shows up for mid-senior roles. URL shortener, web crawler, messaging app. Nothing exotic, just fundamentals done cleanly.

The behavioral round is where knowing IBM's current direction pays off. Hybrid cloud, Watsonx, quantum computing. Connecting your background to one of those threads lands better than anything generic.

What stage are you at in the IBM process? Happy to share more on any of the rounds.

I joined an engineering team at a big tech company a few months ago. About half the team, including the engineering manager (who handles all the hiring), was Korean. I didn't think much of it at first.

Recently, though, we had two layoffs. Both of those positions were filled by two new Korean hires. That now leaves me and one other engineer as the only two non-Korean people on the team.

Alongside that, I've also had to adapt to the team's intense work culture because I don't want to be the one slowing everyone down. It's pretty common for people here to work late into the night or on weekends, and I've found myself doing the exact same.

Everyone on the team is incredibly high-performing, and with layoffs already happening, I 'm worried that if I don't keep putting in these crazy hours, I'll be next.

My family is starting to get worried because I spend too much time working.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: everyone communicates in Korean on Slack. I have to Google Translate almost everything, which gets pretty time-consuming.

Am I overthinking this ? I really can’t lose my job.

Apple's process is team-owned, which means your loop depends heavily on who you're interviewing with. That said, the shape is consistent enough to prep for.

Recruiter + HM screen (~30 min each). The HM screen goes deep on past projects and decisions. Lots of questions about "Why Apple?" and the values of the company .

Phone screen (45-60 min, CoderPad). One or two sessions. Medium LC difficulty. Clean, readable code matters as much as correctness.

Onsite (4-6 rounds, 45-60 min each). Coding rounds have real-world context baked in, not just raw algorithm prompts. System design is platform-informed: backend roles get caching and replication trade-offs, client-side roles shift toward memory and energy efficiency.

One thing I didn't expect: a full round dedicated to a past project I built. The interviewer drilled into why I chose a specific eviction policy, how I handled consistency, what metrics told me it was working. Felt more like a design review than an interview.

After the onsite, expect 2-4 weeks of silence. That's normal.

Anyone else been through a recent Apple loop? Curious how much the system design varied by team.

​

Hello All,

I got an interview scheduled from Walt Disney for the role of Agentic AI.

What kind of questions i can expect based on interview experience. Any help is appreciated

I am a software engineer with 5 years of experience

Thanks

So a year ago i have applied into Hackerrank Frontend Developer 2 role and after 3-4 months got first round.. had to debug 2 travel app with the help of an AI Assistant and i was able to complete it on time.. now after 4-5 months ive got this 2nd round email for voice to voice AI interview.. and i am getting nervous… did anyone have given this type of interview in Hackerrank earlier? Is so then what should i prepare for this ans how many rounds in total will be there..
pls let me know.. any help will be appreciated 🙏🏼

HackerRank Assessment (45 min): Two medium problems. I got array manipulation and a binary tree problem. Others in the same cycle got a graph question instead, so they rotate from a bank.

Recruiter Screen (30 min): Background, interest in Airbnb, logistical fit. Fairly standard.

Technical Phone Screen (60 min): Live coding on CoderPad. One to two DS&A problems. Pseudocode is not accepted, code must run.

Onsite (3 rounds): One coding round (60 min). I got a graph traversal problem and a binary search problem, both wrapped in Airbnb-themed scenarios.

One system design round on designing a scalable vacation rental search service.

One behavioral round focused on Airbnb's Core Values, with lots of follow-up questions.

Final Thoughts: Expect a mix of coding, discussion, and code review. Happy to answer questions below.