Computer Science Interview Experiences

Interview with 2 engineers for about 50 min. Asked me to describe the architecture of a system I worked on, that was my capstone REST API. Then some behavioral stuff about my biggest failure and conflict with supervisors. And then had me describe my personal brand in five words, weirdest interview question I've ever gotten

OA was standard medium difficulty coding problems and the work simulation was kind of intuitive if you've read about their Leadership Principles beforehand. the behavioral section of the final interview goes deep on LP stuff, wanted to know about a time showing ownership and really wanted a strong specific example. the coding part was fine but having weak LP stories is enough to get rejected even if your technical skills are solid, prep your behavioral stories people it's not optional here lol

Passed the HackerRank then on Zoom got one question and solved it but missed an edge case with negative numbers. The recorded video screening after felt like a formality but never secured the role.

Tree problem during the phone screen that was medium difficulty. the onsite was for an iCloud team and they had a system design round about file synchronization across devices. coding was medium LC and the system design round covered storage-related architecture

HackerRank was two medium problems one hashmaps one DP, superday was two 40 min interviews on Zoom one after another. First one went through resume then asked me to code finding duplicates in an array, second was behavioral 'tell me about working with a difficult team member'

Got cut at the final round!! Online assessment had aptitude, Python debugging and three DP/heap problems. Two back to back technical interviews on OOP and a tree problem, then behavioral

A/B testing setup and how to handle p hacking and peeking at results came up and I wasn't expecting that at all. First technical round was statistics and probability, questions about distributions and how you'd design an experiment with finite sample size constraints. Second round was a machine learning system design question about building a merchant recommendation engine at Shopify scale. Also a values interview that felt more human than most. Long process overall but the interviewers were smart and treated it like a real technical conversation rather than a gatekeeping exercise

The problem decomposition round was unlike anything I'd practiced for. Recruiter call about culture and projects, then an OA with coding, SQL and an API task. Virtual onsite had behavioral woven into every round

Karat screen with 3 easy problems plus time complexity discussion. the onsite is where it gets interesting, they had a problem decomposition round where you design a chess game and break it into pieces and then a learning interview where they literally drop you into an unfamiliar codebase and you have to navigate it with some guidance. I think my decomp round wasn't structured enough because I jumped into coding too fast instead of planning the architecture first. every round also has 20 min of behavioral questions mixed in so you can't just be a good coder

The OOP one was designing an order matching engine, domain specific but the interviewer guided me through it. OA had debugging questions and 3 coding problems, finished in time. Technical interviews 45 min each back to back. Behavioral at the end. Return offer rate seems high once you're in

PLUM assessment thing first hate that then a one way video interview where they cut you off after the time limit, super stressful. Codility test had one easy problem and one medium, I got the easy one fully but only partial on the medium. Never made it to the actual interview round.

Excel test had pivot tables vlookups and some more advanced stuff, then interview after was just behavioral. Seemed like the Excel part was weighted pretty heavily.

The online coding assessment they make you do before anything else even happens is intense, then had an HR chat and two back-to back technical interviews with engineers. Questions about algorithms, graph traversal, and dynamic programming. They also asked about how I'd design a system at scale, felt like they were testing both coding ability and problem solving approach

45 min technical interview with a senior engineer who was actually really easy going about it, got a hashmap problem that I solved in about 20 min then 30 min behavioral with the person running it about values and teamwork.

Did a Hirevue first with like 5 questions 30 seconds to prep and 90 seconds to answer, I hate that format so much. Coding assessment after that had a SQL query question and some algorithm stuff never got past that stage

Passed the online coding assessment but bombed the interviews, they were back to back and the second one was harder because you can't just rely on patterns you've memorized. One was a graph problem where you had to optimize on the spot with complexity analysis and the behavioral covered resolving a team conflict and they probed for way more detail than I had, process took 2 months.

Team Screen on Zoom after passing the Hackerrank multi part question. Two problems, one was reading from files and parsing transaction data, the other was making API calls to fetch items and processing them. Python was clearly the right call, they mentioned C++ wasn't ideal for the format. Integration Round was unlike anything I'd done before: private GitHub repo, real API docs, full internet access, building something that actually worked. More like a first day of work than an interview. landed it. a week later

One way virtual interview then live with HR and two managers STAR behavioral and learning something new and situational scenarios plus questions about Scotiabank's core values

Hirevue with 7 questions two written ones about data transformation methodology, followed by another interview on zoom covering SQL joins and Python data cleaning. Its been 3 weeks and nothing

SQL assessment first then Power Day with 2 case interviews a behavioral and a data challenge, cases were hard but manageable. Ended up declining for a better offer but would recommend applying, process is tough but fair

Random phone call for a 15 min screen then had to prepare a presentation on my problem solving approach, that was different from any other interview. After that a 30 min interview with STAR behavioral questions and resume stuff

Zoom technical covering Python data manipulation and SQL on market data. In house round after had questions on distributed systems, not expected for a data focused role

The recorded video behavioral is weird, 30 seconds to think and 2 min to answer each question. Before that it was a HackerRank 60 min with 2 medium problems on sliding window and arrays, then a coding round on Zoom

Phone call with HR then video interview with managers. Questions on customer service experience which was funny and what you'd do if you disagreed with a supervisor. Everyone was really encouraging and friendly

Started off with some small talk with the 2 interviewers they seemed young and both of them also went to UofT so I felt a bit less nervous. Basic interview walked them through my resume they wanted me to elaborate on one of my past SWE experiences like what I did there, what I learned and how it helped me in knowing what I wanted to do after I graduate. Then a pseudo technical question it wasn't leetcode but I could tell they probably just pulled a problem from the website so it was more talk out loud how would you do this kind of thing (linked list question) then they let me ask questions during the last 5-10 mins I would say have questions prepared because they expect you will ask

Portfolio review first where they went through three of my case studies in detail, pushing on why I made specific decisions at each interaction point. Then a design challenge about improving onboarding for new Shopify merchants, 45 minutes to sketch out a user flow and present it. The interviewer pushed on the reasoning behind every design decision, intense but good practice. Then a values interview which felt like a genuine conversation about what you care about and how you work, not a box checking exercise. The whole thing was about 3 hours across two sessions. Shopify design interviews are different from what I'd done elsewhere

Screening call last week and then the interview with a team lead yesterday, he asked about SQL and if I've used Jira before and also a bunch of STAR questions about managing projects and working with people who disagree with you

Stressful if you get stuck early. HackerRank had one multi part question where each part builds on the previous answer. Team screen was more systems oriented, reading and processing files

Interview went fine in the beginnning but then he shifted to GPU memory architecture and I clearly wasn't strong enough there. Recruiter call first, then a medium coding challenge on arrays. Technical phone was with a GPU software engineer

Silence is noticeably penalized here lol. They need reasoning behind every decision you make. OA had three parts: OOP and data structure multiple choice, brain games with memory and pattern recognition (actually kind of fun), and two coding questions. HR call after that about motivation and why trading tech. Technical round was data structure design and the interview style rewards thinking out loud more than getting the right answer quietly.

Recruiter screen then technical assessment medium LC then two 45 min interviews with the managers. Process took 6 weeks, felt long but the actual interviews were reasonable

80 min HackerRank with 2 programming problems and MCQs on data structures, algorithms, OS and networking. OS questions covered process scheduling and memory management, pretty niche second year stuff

Pre recorded video then phone call with HR then 30 min with the manager. Manager got into how I've used data to drive decisions and about my side projects. I showed a Kaggle project I did and they seemed impressed. Easy process overall and they got back to me in two weeks

Felt human throughout. Phone call with HR first, then a team interview on Google Meet where the manager had Gemini open for note taking lol. Questions on the project I was most confident about, comfort with remote work and explaining a technical concept to a non technical person. Last round was with someone from leadership, pretty high level

One way video then live interview with HR and managers. All STAR about learning something new and supply chain scenarios. Intel company values questions and I only knew the obvious ones

They mentioned Apex but it's not required. Recruiter screen 30 min, then two technical interviews on different days. One on heaps, resume project questions mixed in

60 min OA with 2 algorithmic problems used Python then a collaborative phone interview, third round was abstract logic puzzles and recursive stuff unlike anything on leetcode so use whatever language you want just don't try OCaml for first time during an interview.

Virtual assessment first then a real interview with the hiring manager. They asked me about my projects and had me walk through a system design problem where I had to structure the whole approach myself. The interviewer expected you to drive the conversation the entire time. There was a behavioral part too but the technical was the main focus

Online assessment first with situational judgment and pattern recognition and logical reasoning stuff. If you pass that you get a 1 on 1 interview with 4 behavioral and 2 situational questions. Then the panel, 6-7 behavioral questions in one hour using the CAR format not STAR. A lot of questions one after another in a short window

Behavioral was honestly the most laid back part of the whole thing. Recruiter reached out first, 20 min call. Karat had a medium array problem and a follow up on edge cases. Final round was 3 sessions: OOP design for a data store, a graph DSA question then behavioral on how I learn new tech

They want to see you think under pressure. Technical assessment was five timed sections on CS fundamentals. Interview day had behavioral questions and a quick case exercise with a messy dataset

Design a feature for the Shopify merchant dashboard and root cause a metrics problem, also some systems design questions which apparently Shopify dev interviews are way more product focused than other companies

HackerRank then virtual loop with 4 interviews covering SQL, ML, probability and Python coding. one interviewer brought up precision vs recall. took over a month from start to finish

SQL scenario about building a reporting layer for a client dataset and a short case on how I'd present findings to a CFO. Two person interview after the HR screen

Four rounds, a lot for what this role is. First was an online personality test called Arctic something i forget. 30 min video interview with a recruiter after that who was nice actually. Then HackerRank with object oriented programming and SQL questions. Assessment centre last with group exercises and 1 on 1 interviews. Failed at the assessment centre, the group exercise was stressful and I was too quiet throughout

Ran out of time on the coding portion of the hard problem. Codesignal had 3 mediums and 1 hard. Got through the mediums fine but the hard was a graph problem on weighted edges. Never made it to the interview rounds

They had me design a stock trading object, basically OOP with financial instruments as examples. Three rounds. Then a project presentation with the team lead. Toronto team, solid process

Portfolio review where we did a collaborative problem solving duet thing with a designer, that was fun then the life story interview which is them asking about your life and how you got to where you are

Couldn't recall the DBMS details and that cost me. OA was fine. Technical asked about indexing and race conditions, stuff I knew but hadn't reviewed. Then had to explain an ML project end to end including loss function choice

Excel assessment with a data set and like 7 questions then power day with one product interview and two case interviews, cases are quant heavy with P&L stuff and weighted averages. They send sample cases beforehand which are similar to the real ones so practice those

Codility OA then two interviews. first one they went really deep into a side project I had on my resume asking about implementation decisions and tradeoffs for like 20 min and then gave me a linked list problem. second round was the same format, another project deep dive and then 3Sum where they specifically wanted the O(n^2) optimal solution not the naive one. you really need to know your resume projects inside out because they will drill you on every detail

Virtual coding was fine, one easy string reversal one medium array problem. Technical round was OOPs questions like inheritance vs composition and some DBMS normalization. HR was literally just why TD and are you ok with the hybrid schedule.

Codility online assessment first, two questions one was string manipulation and the other was a basic sorting thing both easy. Teams call after that, had me go through SQL stuff like joins and aggregation and we talked about my resume projects for a while

HackerRank SQL joins/aggregations and a Python problem that was harder than expected, basically competitive programming. Combined behavioral and tech at the Toronto office, questions on collaboration and ethical AI, very IBM vibes.

25 min with 2 people resume walkthrough and a conflict question very informal

Mostly behavioral first round, walked through my resume in detail. Then had two more interviews, one behavioral and one technical. The technical one covered system design concepts and then gave me a problem to work through on the spot with follow up questions. They kept asking about cloud architecture and how I'd handle scaling

Panel with two members of the cyber security team. Questions on vulnerability management and a hypothetical about responding to a phishing campaign. Also behavioral covering communicating security risk to non technical stakeholders

Their ML OA is completely different from SWE, 3 Python questions focused on linear algebra and NumPy. then the technical interview was ML system design and they went into questions about residual connections and in context learning in LLMs. you need solid deep learning knowledge not just leetcode skills

Phone screen with HR asking basic background stuff then an interview with a senior engineer and someone from the team. Questions about system design and data structures and then behavioral stuff about a time I failed at something. They wanted to know what I know about Meta's products and recent launches, there's a lot going on so definitely research beforehand.

CUDA and GPU memory questions which I was not prepared for as a DS candidate. also Python and ML model selection. Nvidia DS is very different from other companies because of the GPU focus

Sliding window problem on arrays to start, solved it in Python and we spent the rest of the time walking through my projects. Second round was a system design question about real time notifications at scale, interviewer was helpful when I got stuck on the fanout logic. Whole process took about 3 weeks.

Whole pipeline moved fast, under 3 weeks from application to offer. Recruiter call was casual maybe 15 minutes, they just wanted to make sure I was a real person basically. Coding test had 3 questions in C++, LeetCode easy to medium, completely on your own time so I could do it on a weekend. Technical interview with the team lead after covered DSA and also went through my resume in detail, he was interested in a specific data structure implementation I had built in a side project and asked good follow up questions. The role was in Markham

The interviewer seemed surprised I hadn't prepped distributed systems more lol. Hacker rank was 2 questions. SQL assessment had Snowflake specific syntax for streaming data, more complex than expected. Superday had 4 sessions but couldn't answer the system design on distributed query optimization well enough

Know IT audit concepts deep, not just concptually if you're applying here. Hirevue then a technical round on IT controls and cybersecurity risks in financial reporting. Final behavioral with a director. Five weeks total

Good expectations for a co-op. Technical round was with two engineers, CI/CD pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes basics and infrastructure as code. Also asked how I'd handle a failing deployment in production.

Zoom round with an engineer who spent 20 min on my resume before giving me a coding problem on graph traversal. Then in house at the NYC office with three engineers. One was data structures, one was designing a stock alert system with real time data requirements, and the third was an open ended problem solving session where they just gave me a messy problem and let me work through it. Language agnostic throughout, nice since I used Python. The office was impressive.

Process took 3 weeks they were slow to schedule next rounds but the people I met with were all friendly. Questions like walk me through this block of JavaScript and CSS nothing I haven't seen before but be careful about very specific syntax

30 min prescreen phone call with the manager then 45 min on Teams with the manager and a team member. STAR questions and they had me explain how digital forensics tools work and data recovery processes. Brush up on that. Friendly atmosphere but they expect solid interest in the cybersecurity space.

Recruiter screen then technical interview, SQL and Power BI questions then behavioral with the manager. The technical wasnt bad, they asked what steps I'd take to analyze a dataset and how to assess if a model works. Manager round was just vibes, wanted to know what motivates me and three words to describe myself

Senior person and a junior person, only 20 minutes but they asked some surprisingly hard questions about market risk for a co-op interview. They wanted to know about Canadian current events too so be ready for that.

Pre-recorded video interview first where most people apparently get screened out then a 30 min phone call where we talked about my experience for 15 min and then they got into an algorithm question about linked lists and reversing them. And wanted to know why Thomson Reuters and what my least favorite class was, pretty weird question. Got a HackerRank after that with 2 coding questions

Three rounds total, first one was just HR asking about teamwork and stuff standard then second round the manager had me walk through my resume and then REST API questions like how I'd design one from scratch. Third round they gave me a coding question to merge two sorted lists and I got it but took too long explaining the time complexity part

OA had MCQs then coding bracket matching variation and a sliding window optimization problem

Offer 5 days later. Hirevue then superday, three back to back interviews. Binary search and dynamic programmg

Four rounds over about 5 weeks, absolutely brutal. HR, technical, team lead, then head of department. Technical got into app architecture and database reliability. One question about how you'd handle an outage. Got redirected to a different team after round 2 and that added a week. No offer from either team

The Hirevue then a live case with a manager. Case was about a bank automating loan approvals. Had to think through tech options and the change management side. Behavioral after was short

Process was slow but they communicated well. Two virtual technical rounds, first was SQL and schema design with indexing, second was cloud concepts where I had to describe building a multi region cache.

They really care about problem framing over getting to the perfect answer. PM interview was with one product manager and one engineering manager. Product sense question about how you'd improve a specific feature in the Telus MyAccount app, then metrics for defining success on a new feature rollout where they asked for both engagement and business metrics. Also a behavioral about navigating a disagreement between product and engineering where priorities differed. The engineering manager barely spoke during my product sense but asked pointed questions during the metrics part

Karat screen went fine. Final round was three consecutive sessions. Object oriented programming design were alright but behavioral was weird, interviewer kept using hypotheticals instead of past experience questions

Two OAs then two technical rounds on OOP and systems. Offer in 12 days

Online application took a while to process. Virtual panel with two managers about working with messy data, how I'd approach a dataset I've never seen and communicating findings to council. About two months end to end

Screening then panel of 3, one manager and two developers. Technical questions on data structures and some behavioral. They also threw a quick French assessment at the end even for the dev role. 42 days and then a rejection. High difficulty rating is accurate

SQL and Python technical round. Made it to finals then didn't make it through with zero feedback.

Networked with the school team beforehand which I think helped a lot, first round was with two engineers who went into system design and walked through some coding problems. Superday was five interviews one after another and by the fourth one I was just running on autopilot. They care a lot about personality, every single person asked why Lyft and they kept digging into the cultural fit stuff

Think the offer went to an internal referral honestly. Hackerrank with data focused questions, then a technical interview covering networking troubleshooting concepts and design thinking questions about structuring a dataset. Went fine but they moved fast

HackerRank on REST and ML basics, then recruiter call, then team round. All virtual. Rejected

Had two coding rounds on Zoom, LC mediums. Short behavioral at the end. Offer came in like 2 weeks

OA had two LC medium questions, plus work simulation questions, then final round was heavy on leadership principles, brought up disagreeing with someone and they push for specific detail on your examples

One way video then live interview STAR format like how would coworkers describe me wasn't hard

Manager seemed distracted and the questions were very generic, not sure what they were looking for. OA was 40 questions, MCQs on CS fundamentals and two DSA problems. Passed. Coding round got a two pointer problem I solved. HR was fine. Got rejected a week later

Interview with two people from the analytics team after a quick HR call. SQL on aggregatng sales across regions, brief case on return rate trends and Tableau experience. Very retail focused but easy

Email questionnaire first then Byteboard thing in two parts. Read a design doc and left technical comments, then implemented something from scratch. Got stuck on implementation because the constraints were unusual

I was asked about all the technical jargon on my resume and about my projects and internships. Interview was with 2 people only 45 min total. For example, they asked me about git and they asked me about feature engineering and vectorization (because I had ML projects on my resume)!

Just had the interview yesterday. Phone screen was quick 15 min then technical round with questions about SQL and what software I've used before and to describe a project. Behavioral with my interviewer was about handling difficult situations and what motivates me and I had to describe myself in three words which I always find awkward. Fingers crossed

Hirevue had 6 questions, prep time was about 20 seconds each. Then a Teams interview with a behavioral section about client management and a smmall case about a company migrating to the cloud. Final director call was just a vibe check

Pair programming on CoderPad for like 50 minutes in Python. The problem wasn't leetcode hard but had a lot of edge cases to work through. The system design round was about designing a notification service and the interviewer was engaged. Behavioral after that was with the team lead, conversational.

2 coding questions and then a behavioral questionnaire where they give you scenarios and you pick how you'd respond. the actual interview was half behavioral half coding. they care a lot about innovation and customer experience so have stories ready about improving things and working on teams. coding part was a sliding window problem which I'd literally practiced the day before

Had 1 recruiter screen which was a vibe check round then had 1 behavioral where i was asked about my projects and experiences. Was asked alot of AI related questions related to Hallucinations etc. 3rd round was the technical on hackerrank, it was a OOD question about designing a traffic light controller

Phone screen with recruiter then another call with ops team, then take home assignment analyzing some operations problem. Haven't done the final round yet but people have been nice and the take home was interesting

Most of the question where behavioral like why IBM, what does IBM stand for, how did you hear about this position, Are you familiar with the tech stack required for this position.

Interview was mostly behavioral with a "technical" question of how I would implement a specific project. Recruiter didn't respond after the interview but got the offer after a few weeks of silence

I was scheduled a technical round and behavioral round with Google on the same day. They were both ~1hr. I felt it wasn't a good experience because the engineers who interviewed me seemed like they couldn't be arsed, which made me more nervous. The engineer who conducted the technical interview didn't explain the question well and also messed up on the problem constraints which I had to clarify. The question was not a LC style question, surprisingly. For the behavioral it was pretty standard asking about experience and how you work with others

Nothing too unusual started out with an OA just to see if you know what you're doing in terms of basic backend concepts then a couple other rounds asking about technicals (NoSQL, Git, REST APIs)

4 rounds including phone interview, they start to really go in dpeth during the third and fourth rounds where they ask deep technicals about data structures and OOP. Make sure you know your stuff when it comes to the languages they list on the job description because they will be asking everything you can imagine

OA -> team matching -> 2x 45 min First round was technical round, I was asked Last Stone Weight. Super chill Second round was a behavioral/system design round with the HM. Fun thorough resume dive where he asked questions about the first few bullet points I had and then asked me to talk through how I would design a card tokenization system

Two rounds both virtual they kept asking about ethical dilemmas and times when people didn't support my work, wanted to know about Excel and Power BI no hard tech stuff

One interview with a manager for 30 minutes, why consulting why KPMG what tools I've used and questions about KPMG values

3 rounds. 1 recruiter screen, 1 behavioral/technical, final round back to back behavioral and technical. Fairly easy technicals, but behaviorals had some curveball questions I wasn't expecting

There were 3 back-to-back rounds, technical was OOP design, and behavioral was standard. Each round was 1 hour long

The HackerRank OA had three parts, coding then SQL then an API task and I thought I did fine on coding but the SQL was rough

So many rounds. Phone screening, coding assessment, behavioral with the team, then another cultural fit interview and then a final with a senior manager. The technical part had questions about Lockheeds defense programs oddly specific. We talked about how I'd build a dashboard to track system performance metrics

No technical content for an IT role, just behavioral and situational. Applied through the co-op coordinator, got through to the interview stage. Lost points on a question about handling conflicting feedback from two supervisors

Tree problem, lowest common ancestor with extra constraints. Missed an edge case. Made it to the technical screen after a phone call but recruiter never followed up

Final round had a 2 hour panel that included a game design question on the spot. Actually kind of fun. Before that was an HR screen then a technical hour with the engineering manager about past challenges

They weighted communication skills heavily. Recruiter reached out, screen then a panel with two project managers. Behavioral questions, Jira experience, how I maage timelines when requirements shift, a time a project went sideways. Nothing too intense

HireVue first, 6 questions 30 sec prep for each, favorite data structure came up then HackerRank had two medium and hard, solved one fully and partially the other and never got to superday

Took 2 weeks, four rounds total. Panel had me talk through strengths and school challenges

Byteboard is completely different from LC prep. You review a technical document and write inline comments, then implement code from scratch. Rewards engineering judgment over memorization. About 28 days start to finish

I had Azure experience not AWS and I think that hurt me. OA had networking and cloud questions plus a short coding component. Technical interview covered AWS services, VPC architecture and IAM