Interview experiences

Scale AI Engineer in New York: seven rounds, a deck of cards LLD, a RAG pipeline OOP round and two ML rounds that ended it

7 rounds. Deck of cards LLD, RAG pipeline OOP round, behavioural, then two ML rounds. Tripped on ML fundamentals and got rejected.

By Samuel Davis

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.

Affirm Staff Engineer: recruiter and HM screens, a recursive revenue HackerRank and a payment processing design with idempotency keys

Standard Affirm loop. Recruiter + HM screens, a recursion problem on HackerRank, then a payment processing design that goes deep on idempotency.

By Camila Patel

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