Software Engineer 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

one of the best interview processes I've been through, pair programming was chill and the engineer was super helpful not adversarial at all and life story was actually kind of nice to do. I ended up declining because I got a US offer that paid way more but I'd come back and interview at amazon again in a heartbeat, they seem to care about who you are as a person

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.

Failed the online assessment lol, took too long on the first coding problem and ran out of time on the second one so got the rejection email a few days later, no feedback

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'

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

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.

coding was straightforward and interview was mostly about past projects and coding fundamentals everyone gets asked

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

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

they give you a 24 hour take home case study with actual ridesharing data where you have to analyze it and write up a full report with your methodology and assumptions and conclusions. I spent way too much time making the writeup look good and polished and ran out of time to actually do proper modeling. should have just focused on the analysis first and cleaned up the report at the end

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.

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

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

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

Pre recorded video with like 6 questions then recruiter call, asked about working under pressure and basic system design stuff.

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

CodeSignal OA first, 4 questions in 70 minutes. Third one was doable but the last one involved matrices and was tough. Power Day was like 4 hours of interviews in a row. Had a case interview about whether to drop a credit card fee, actually interesting, then system design was designing some monitoring dashboard. Behavioral was STAR stuff. Just a long day overall

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

Codility OA two problems, graph and DP (kill me lol). Technical interview they went deep on one of my projects and then gave me a 2D array problem. Final round was another project discussion plus 3Sum wanting optimal O(n^2) which I thankfully knew

hirevue right after applying had to do it same day, phone screen with VP was mostly behavioral then superday had three easy coding questions like reverse a string and Fibonacci also two behavioral

Usual process. Phone screen then a longer interview, Agile methodology questions and how I handle scope changes. The interviewer was really nice and we ended up just talking about the team for the last 10 minutes

Campus placement, Codility OA one medium one hard then went into my ML project and gave me a linked list problem. Final round I inverted a BST in 5 minutes and then we just talked about Microsoft culture

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

Aptitude test and pair coding with SQL window functions then a general fit interview then final rounds about how your work impacts customer experience. The fit interview was a unique round where they really wanted to understand your background and motivations

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.

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

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.

Did not expect probability and stats MCQs on the OA but there they were alongside DSA questions. Technical covered OS topics like paging and semaphores plus a project discussion. Behavioral was standard. About four weeks total

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

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.

HR had guesstimates and I was not prepared for that at all, they wanted an estimate for rides in Mumbai on a weekday. Before that was an aptitude test covering English reasoning math and computer fundamentals. Technical was two rounds, one on project discussion and programming basics and one with coding problems. Cut after the HR round

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

15 min prescreen with their campus recruitment team just asking behavioral stuff. Then assessment day was wild, they put us in groups and gave us two business case studies to solve and present

OA graph traversal and hashmap both medium, interview 30 min behavioral 30 min coding had STAR stories for customer obsession and bias for action and coding was two pointers straightforward if you prep the LPs

NQT had aptitude, verbal and coding. Coding was string manipulation and trees. Technical round covered OOP and basic DBMS plus my academic project. HR asked why TCS and the five year plan question

Recruiter screen was easy going, both technical rounds hard which I solved clean (tree optimization)

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

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

OA was one big question split into three parts that build on each other, all practical implementation not leetcode. The onsite had data parsing and then an integration round with a real github repo and API docs

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

Coding round then machine coding where I built a simplified order book in Python. Technical interviews went into system design for a credit card reward tracking system and object oriented programming patterns. HR was quick at the end about long term goals and PPO interest. CRED interviews are more about design than algorithmic speed

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

GPU memory hierarchy, C++ templates and a design question about a parallel task queue. Technical interview was with a couple engineers after passing the OA (two medium coding questions on arrays and graphs). Waiting to hear back

Online coding test then technical interview, coding had dynamic programming and recursion and interview was walking through solutions and edge cases and a project from my resume done in 2 weeks

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

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

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)!

Coding round on SHL platform, 3 questions. Got through two but the third was a hard DP on optimal subarray partitioning that I couldn't crack in time. SHL is clunkier than LeetCode. Tech interviews never happened

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.

They dug into a resume project then gave me a 2D array problem where the interviewer kept pushing for better time complexity. couldn't get there

2 Rounds -- 30 Minutes Each R1) Standard behavioral questions / Resume Review -- Tell me about a time where X, tell me about X project on your resume etc. R2) Technical -- OOP Style questions, designing functions to fit some goal, required familiarity with inheritance, interfaces, protected methods, and writing functions. Psuedocode was accepted, did not write any business logic, just sketched out the functions

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

90 min pair programming that was collaborative, hash map and recursion stuff then a life story interview where they ask what drives you and it all felt natural

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.

I had 2 rounds on interview, botn was medium Leetcode. The first question was the variation of Fizz Buzz, where we need to check multiple conditions before printing anything. The second question was design a template like google doc, where each line has a character limit, and if the word exceeds the limit it should be placed in the next line

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

3 rounds last one had coding question in python using hash tables they helped me along when I got stuck and eventually solved it but took me some time

all behavioral stuff like going above and beyond and time management and what I know about Qualcomm

Standard hirevue then phone screen was conversational about projects and internships. Technical round after that had easy coding string manipulation and recursion and a behavioral round, way less intense than I expected for how many rounds there were

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

To write a "valid" experience for Shopify on your resume, it needs to reflect their unique engineering culture—specifically their "crafter" mindset, their focus on high-scale commerce, and their specific 2026 tech stack (which heavily emphasizes Ruby on Rails, React, and GraphQL)

42 question OA with MCQs on networking OOPs OS DBMS plus 2 coding. Spent too long on MCQs and barely had time for coding

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

OA was 4 medium-hard DSA. First had a tree problem and graph traversal. Second was harder with a DP problem. Manager round had a guesstimate about pizzas delivered in Mumbai daily where you need to walk through a framework

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

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

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

Quick call with a supervisor who asked basic stuff about SQL and Java. then managers interview, went into Angular and Spring Boot which aren't on most co-op resumes lol. no whiteboard or anything just discussion based

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

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

Couldn't crack the PSDS round in time. OA was 4 questions in 60 min, got 3 done. PSDS had twisted constraints, one was BFS on a graph that mutates during traversal.

Take home was a debugging task in TypeScript, find the bug and fix it. Found it but my explanation wasn't great apparently because I got cut. No lettcode involved, refreshing but also harder to prepare for.

System design, coding on a shared doc, behavioral and a PM round.

Phone screen about SQL experience then take home assessment with 5 queries like joins aggregations window functions and walked through solutions after.

Half solved a graph problem and that was probably it. OA then behavioral then the coding round. They really care about culture fit

No take home OA, different. Technical interview with two engineers, DSA questions in C++ or Java, one on graph traversal and one on string manipulation. Also questions about network protocol experience

LeetCode round was the main filter here. Phone screen, networking questions, LeetCode, final panel. Got the offer

Recruiter call was fast, 15 min tops. Then they sent a HackerRank with two medium problems on string manipulation and graph traversal. They passed 3 weeks later with no feedback

Got stuck on the third C++ coding question and never made it to the tech interview. Phone screen first, then a coding test with three questions, passed two

Ninety minutes felt like a panel. Three 30 min segmennts back to back, DSA and OOP first, then systems questions on CPU scheduling and memory hierarchy, then fit. Intel specific knowledge helps even for SWE

Coding round had 3 DSA problems medium to hard. Passed and got to machine coding round, had to implement a basic rate limiter in Java from a problem statement. Design was okay but my API structure was messy. Technical interview never happened

Easy online assessment then recruiter call, followed by a technical hour with a LeetCode easy and project discussion. Last round was a culture add interview, basically behavioral. Decision within two weeks

Got the 5 interview questions emailed like 30 minutes before so I could prep i was so shocked . Interview was maybe 25 minutes, all behavioral. What do you know about us, scenario about how you'd handle conflicting priorities. Nothing technical which surprised me

Fast process, heard back in about a week. Phone screen with HR then a short technical interview, 10 to 15 minutes on experience and team fit. No coding challenge. They had questions about web development and API work but it was light