Senior interview experiences

Cloudflare Software Engineer in London: hiring manager chat, culture fit, PM round, HTTP server debugging, Instagram for cats and an AI-assisted coding round

5 rounds after a hiring manager chat: culture fit, a PM round, debugging a broken HTTP server, Instagram for cats, and an AI-assisted coding round.

By Ivan Walker

Bloomberg Senior Engineer: Decode String screen, Stock Exchange design and Meeting Rooms II

Recruiter, Decode String, then stock exchange design + Meeting Rooms II + hiring manager in one go. Offer, they wouldn't match so I passed.

By Mateo Fischer

Zscaler Engineer in Tel Aviv: team lead chat, an onsite with Min Stack, an append-only log SQL problem and LRU Cache, then the R&D director

3 rounds, half behavioural. Min Stack, an append-only log SQL problem, LRU cache, then the R&D director. Nothing exotic if you've done the lists.

By Marcus Clark

Waymo Software Engineer in Mountain View: two robot grid problems, a Street View style infrastructure design and Expressive Words

Two grid/robot problems, an infra-flavoured Street View design, an Expressive Words variant, then team matching. No exact LeetCode for the grids.

GitLab Senior Engineer: merge request review, pair programming and a behavioural hiring manager call

Different format: you review a real merge request and then pair on it. Mostly behavioural otherwise. Turned the offer down after a counter.

Tesla Software Engineer: Codility OA, a React infinite scroll screen, an onsite with Trapping Rain Water, an OTA fleet update LLD and a telemetry pipeline, then Evidence of Excellence

Codility OA, React infinite scroll screen, 4-round onsite (Trapping Rain Water, OTA update LLD, telemetry HLD), then the Evidence of Excellence write-up.

OpenAI Senior Engineer in San Francisco: Decode String, a GitHub Actions system design and Stream Parsing and Sliding Windows

Decode String live, design GitHub Actions (queue fairness, noisy neighbours), then two coding rounds + behavioural. Accepted. Grind and you can do it.

Monzo SE III in London: CV deep dive, a Java web crawler take-home and a top N songs system design

CV deep dive, web crawler take-home in Java with a review call, then a top-N songs design at Spotify scale. Have your Redis answer ready.

By Nora Nguyen

Barclays Software Engineer in Prague: a Number of Islands style graph problem, SQL, OOP and multithreading questions, then a leadership round

Three rounds in Prague. Number of Islands variant, SQL joins/indexes/partitions, OOP and multithreading questions, then leadership behavioural.

Millennium Junior Engineer: Merge Intervals OA, concurrency LLD and a Distributed Cache design

Straightforward month-long loop. Merge Intervals OA, then concurrency LLD, distributed cache design and behavioural. Took a different offer.