Real Interview Experiences
Learn what to expect directly from candidates and interviewers who've been through it.
- 1,323 experiences
- 313 companies
- 37 roles
- +204 added this month
CohereForward Deployed Engineer · L6“The interview process did not involve much about customer empathy or dealing with tough customers, all it cared was backend swe practices. This was for an infrastructure role but the screen had nothing to do with that. I also was told to prepare for AI system design but I got a backend system design question, so my preparation time was wasted :( and each interview had two ppl not one primary and the other shadowing, it was two ppl asking questions.”
CohereMachine Learning Engineer · L6“The system design interview was data collection, SFT and RL stages. It went well for me. It was focused on LLM post training techniques. The ML coding was worst for me although I practiced the same question but using PyTorch and doing without PyTorch and without any documentation was challenging for me.”
CohereSoftware Engineer · L5“The process was very practical and not leetcodey at all, though knowing the fundamentals like different types of traversals, rate limiting primitives, scheduling policies did help. The interview process is a bit long, lots of wait between rounds but overall, it's smooth. ”
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.”
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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.”
