Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
- 1,293 experiences
- 306 companies
- 36 roles
- +220 added this month
CiscoAgentic AI Developer (Grade 8) · L4“I hadn't really practiced doing an agentic system design round in an online drawing tool, so that caught me unaware...”
CiscoSenior Product Manager“My process started with a recruiter screen, followed by an interview with the hiring leader, then two 45-minute interviews covering strategy, prioritization, technical communication, and design thinking. Scheduling was smooth and communication was clear throughout. What went well: the interviews themselves were substantive and well-run, and the recruiter was responsive at every stage. I especially appreciated being offered a feedback call after the decision. That's rare, and the feedback was specific and actionable.”
CiscoSoftware Engineer · L8+“The interview process was very simple. Unlike other software companies there were little technical deep-dives. There were no coding rounds, however there were 2 system designs, 1 behavioral and 1 cross-functional round. Questions were nothing out of the ordinary. Interviews went very well that I landed an offer.”
CiscoAI Engineer · L3“It was a nice interview process. They cared about production concerns of Agentic systems. The fundamentals of transformers parts went well for me. What may not have gone so well would be productions concerns related questions like latency as it was my first job.”
Similar interview experiences
Sierra AIAgent Strategist“The agent design round was a live whiteboard: a new customer wants a cancellation agent, so map out the user journey and every system it needs to plug into.”
PalantirForward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer · L3“In the learning round they taught me one of their products from scratch, then kept adding constraints. They expected me to reason through it like I was already on the team.”
OpenAISoftware engineer“I still can’t tell if the final twist had a right answer, or if it was a test of how I handle something nearly impossible.”
StripeEngineering Manager · L6“What stuck with me was how fast it got into management judgment, like straight up asking if I'd actually managed a low performer and what makes someone staff in my eyes.”
AmazonSoftware Development Engineer, Level 4 · L3“It was the usual four-round AWS loop, but the HM actually spent time on how I use GenAI to fast track my workflow, and the Bar Raiser was basically all LPs with tons of follow-ups.”
GoogleSenior Software Engineer · L5“It was basically the most by-the-book Google loop possible: shortest path in a DAG, minimum meeting rooms, then a news feed design where they kept pushing on fanout, storage, and ranking.”
“My first technical round wasn’t with a person. An AI interviewer ran the whole thing, from logistics questions to reviewing my code line by line.”
MindbodySoftware Developer III · L5“The weirdest round was basically a PR review for an order-messaging system where I had to spot bugs and explain how I'd structure it so a Kafka-to-SQS switch later wouldn't turn into a rewrite.”
GoogleStaff Software Engineer · L6“The system design wasn’t generic. It was built around the team’s actual work: an AI agent that lets enterprise users search and query their data and documents.”
PalantirForward Deployed Software Engineer (Commercial)“You can’t treat coding and communication as separate skills here. Even after my code was right, they asked why I chose that approach and how I’d explain the trade-off to someone non-technical.”
Preview full access of other recent interview experiences
AnthropicSoftware Engineer, Safeguards · L5“The weirdest Anthropic round was the company values interview. It was almost like a therapy session, and honestly if you went to a therapist at some point, you will pass that round much more easily.”
NetflixEngineering Manager, Tooling“What was very unusual is they didn’t give me any tooling to draw the system design, so I just sketched it on a piece of paper and talked them through it, then we got into this oddly deep debate about whether hover-over history should count as a recommendation signal.”
