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
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.”
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.”
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.”
AmazonAmazon L3 · L3“They brought up on-call in multiple conversations, so that was the culture signal I actually believed. Then the hiring manager had me design a package tracker that could survive duplicate, out-of-order updates during Prime Day.”
Sierra AIStaff Software Engineer · L6“At staff level, they cared less about the code and more about how I’d split the work into phases and show progress at each one.”
StripeForward Deployed Engineer“The coding round explicitly let me use AI, but they were not looking for a one-shot prompt. They were judging whether I could break the work down, catch the model when it went sideways, and run my own review loop while still shipping.”
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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.”
