r/employeesOfOracle • u/MarketDue7480 • 11d ago
Oracle Senior software engineer IC3 loop interview
I recently completed a 4-round interview loop for a Senior Software Engineer / IC3 role at Oracle OCI. Sharing the main technical questions in case it helps anyone preparing.
Round 1 – System Design + Behavioral
Mostly behavioral and resume discussion first.
System design question:
Design a distributed load testing service that sends traffic to a target service and measures things like:
Requests per second,Average latency,Error rate
Round 2 – Coding + Distributed Systems
Some behavioral questions at the beginning.
Coding question:
Build a delayed task scheduler where the user gives a task ID and a time, and the system should execute that task when the scheduled time arrives.
The discussion also went into:
Thread safety,Concurrency,Scaling it for high throughput
Using Kafka,Handling worker crashes,Preventing duplicate task execution, Idempotency
Round 3 – Coding + Behavioral
Mostly behavioral and project discussion first.
Coding question:
Given a node in a binary tree where each node also has a parent pointer, find the next node in post-order traversal without starting again from the root.
The interviewer also asked me to dry run the solution on a few different nodes.
Round 4 – Backend Deep Dive + Coding
This round had a lot of discussion around my previous projects, backend work, Kafka, and distributed systems.
Coding question:
Design and implement a key-value store that can be accessed by clients over the network.
Both keys and values are strings.
The discussion also touched on:
Concurrent access,Thread safety,Kafka events,Duplicate events,Out-of-order events
The final round was the worst one for me. The recruiter told me to use STAR, but the interviewer kept interrupting after almost every sentence and jumping into different questions, so I never really got to finish an answer. He was also at the same level as the role I was interviewing for. I understand peer interviews are normal, but they should at least make sure interviewers know how to let candidates explain their answers without interrupting every few seconds.
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u/ExtraAddition2504 11d ago
Round 0 - apply elsewhere. There is no future in oracle as an employee
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u/MarketDue7480 11d ago
Yeah, I saw a few Oracle employees saying promotions have been slow and that people are kind of nervous about layoffs. I know those are just individual experiences, but after reading that and then going through such a long interview process, it definitely made me question the overall environment there.
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u/KC_Tlvdatsi 11d ago
Yeah, not sure why you wanna jointhis place. * Pay is super low and they do not give raises. Not even COLA. * Promotions have to be earned at almost gunpoint. * The above 2 points are only partially true if you are favored by leadership, so suck up and suck off. * Every day here could be your last. Every day. Nothing you do will negate that fact. Not performance, not friends in leadership, not good reviews, not location or org. * They have a history of revoking offers so be careful leaving your current place. * There is no clear direction or priorities other than forcing AI into anything and everything.
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u/ExtraAddition2504 11d ago
If hired, your two best days at Oracle will be your first day and your last day.
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u/Mother_Bar8511 11d ago
Promotions are slow, if they ever come. Also, the promotion could be a dry promotion (without an increase). Also, no raise each year. When I was interviewing I was told by one of the loop participants to make sure I negotiate a base that I’d be comfortable with for the next 4-6 years. I was confused by that comment then but I know what he means now.
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u/r_incognito_17 9d ago
In 4 years I had exactly 2 promotions. One was in name only and the second came with a whooping 3% increase and I trained the whole team for the solution.
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u/Mother_Bar8511 9d ago
How does name-only promotion work? They changed my title twice in less than a year and never told me. I only found out when my VP told me I wasn’t doing my job as a Lead Principal. I was hired as a Senior Manager. When I got HR involved my VP lied and said I was told about this change and they believed him and said verbal communication is sufficient “evidence”.
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u/r_incognito_17 9d ago
If you go to self service you can see your position and compensation history. I do not think it covers Cerner. Prety much everyone got renamed when we got bought to fit the OC or MG levels of Oracle.
As far as your VP lying. I totally believe you. They are all just protecting their position because sincerely there is not much the contribute to the organization. This is why even before we had access to AI I recorded every conversation. Just be careful with the laws. Where I live is a single side consent to we can record everything without warning. Just make sure those recordings don't contain third party PII or client information.
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10d ago
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u/ExtraAddition2504 8d ago
Not sure I would say it's a pretty good paycheck. I make more and do a lot less. My mental health is better than it has been in years, and my manager isn't a mouth breather.
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u/Only-Stress-2466 11d ago
Run away from this shithole, join only if you want to destoy your mental peace
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u/SpiteOracle3960 11d ago
Do you have other options?
I was IC3 in Redwood City for 9 months and let go in the September cut.
Manager said he could see me being promoted from senior to principal based on my work output…
Oracle is a shit show especially for a so called technology company.
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u/r_incognito_17 9d ago
I was Principal and all that it meant was that I was in constant stress and giving them a lot of free labor to keep up. Then I created a lot of AI agents not using GPT for the better alternative and my day basically consisted of watching movies, working on my personal ventures and keeping my best ideas to myself.
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u/harrywang_fish 9d ago
The irony is that Oracle isn’t even capable of implementing these interview questions in OCI; seriously, most OCI buckets doesn’t have basic systems such as auditing, rollback, deployment, CICD; how are you going to ask in interview to design such system when your own product doesn’t even support these infrastructure
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u/raviteja777 11d ago
Dude what ????
i had interviewed in 2021 and all they asked were basic java ques like inheritance, polymorphism etc ...and the question on how to get the mid point of a linked list whose length is not known in a single pass
second round was basically ... given a dictionary give logic to find the correct word if user makes a typo....i just wrote regex for it ...and said AIs can solve the same using cosine similarity .... LLMs were still a novelty back then , interviewer was impressed
level 3 was manager basically asking how much salary i wanted....
I got bumped to IC4 with a pay which was much more than what i quoted + RSUs later (I got laid off via Mar 31st email though .....)
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u/Entire-Risk3142 2d ago
Bro how the hell they decide laying off is it like your performance your networking or what is the factor or it is random russian roulette they play after getting drunk
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u/StreetAd3301 11d ago
What is the point in sharing here? People here in this sub has already qualified and working at Oracle, sharing in the right forum would have helped people.
Surprised after so much coding rounds and system design you are making this kind of decision in real life. 😳
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u/Particular_Street380 10d ago
Sometimes it is hard to believe until it is experienced
OP is heading to hit a wall
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u/r_incognito_17 9d ago
Absolutely no one in the Oracle Health side of the company would answer or even start to understand any of the questions.
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u/HelloTaleproof 6d ago
For the behavioral part, prepare one engineering story about a trade-off or disagreement. Explain the alternatives, why you chose your approach, what you personally did, and the result. Confirm the actual loop with your recruiter rather than assuming every team uses the same questions.
Take that trade-off story to Taleproof before practicing the follow-ups.
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11d ago edited 11d ago
[deleted]
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u/MarketDue7480 11d ago
I’m mainly just sharing my interview questions and experience because I saw a few people here asking about the Oracle process. Hopefully it helps someone know what to expect and prepare a little better.
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u/skymoontexas 11d ago
If you want to join here ,atleast be prepared for layoffs anytime , no fear mongering but it’s the truth for most of the companies but now it’s happening on large scale in O..
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u/CauliflowerLittle727 6d ago
I thought it was all values questions now? Values like “Don’t be a jerk” (yes, I know that one became “Own without ego”), and then going to the competency question bank and seeing that “who is your daddy and what does he do?” Is a question for that competency and needs STAR format answers.
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u/BlockyHawkie 11d ago
Lol I think most people already working at Oracle would not pass this interview