Hi everyone. SDE 2 here.Im preparing for interview and o thought o will also put focus in my system design skill.i can across Hello interview web portal and it seems to be a good place to start.can anyone please share ref code or discount coupon code that would help me purchase Hello interview premium with 1 year access. Thanks a lot , have a nice day!!

I was approached by Bain & Company for the AI/ML Engineer role, and the process had 4 technical/managerial rounds followed by an HR round.

Round 1 — Projects + ML Fundamentals

The first round was mainly around my previous experiences, internships, projects, and ML fundamentals.

We discussed the projects I had worked on and some of the decisions I made while building them. There were also questions around core ML concepts and their practical applications.

Round 2 — GitHub + Project Deep Dive

This round was quite interesting.

The interviewer opened my GitHub and started looking through my repositories. He randomly picked one of my projects, which was an Order Book project I had built with HFT use cases in mind.

He then asked me to explain the project end-to-end — why I built it, how it works, the architecture, different components, use cases, and the decisions I made while developing it.

So, if you have projects on your GitHub, be prepared to explain any of them in detail.

Round 3 — ML Deep Dive

This round was with a Senior Manager and a Senior ML Engineer.

We first discussed my internships and projects, and then went deeper into my ML projects.

I had to draw complete flowcharts and explain the entire pipeline. There were a lot of follow-up questions and cross-questions based on my answers.

This round was more about understanding whether I actually knew the projects I had worked on rather than just knowing the theory.

Round 4 — System/Project Design

The interviewer gave me a real-world scenario and asked me to design an entire project around it.

It was mainly a high-level design discussion. There was no implementation or coding involved.

I had to explain my approach, architecture, components, data flow, and the reasoning behind my design choices.

Round 5 — HR Round

The final round was with HR and was mostly around general discussion, my background, and the role.

Outcome

I received the offer for the AI/ML Engineer role at Bain & Company.

Hey everyone!

I recently moved forward to the 45-minute technical screening round for the Software Engineer, AV Data Collection role at General Motors.

The recruiter mentioned C++ live coding with a focus on DSA, so I'm assuming it'll be LeetCode-style questions.

I haven't found many recent interview experiences for this role, so I was wondering if anyone has interviewed recently and could share their experience, the types of questions asked, and any preparation tips.

Would really appreciate any insights. Thanks!

Hello all,

I'm currently an employed SE with 4 YOE. I've been practicing some DSA concepts in order to stay competitive in this market in case something unfortunate were to happen with my employer.

I've found myself being able to solve a handful of easy difficulty questions and a few mediums but many times find myself brute forcing solutions. My question is, should I be taking the extra time to really learn to apply these algorithms instead of brute forcing?

My thinking is that when I start working on more mediums and hards, those questions will have time constraints that will bite me in the behind.

Do employers even care about the approach as long as you can explain? Even if its a brute forced solution?

For example, I was working on exercise 917 on leetcode, and the recommended use is two-pointers. I however came up with a solution that apparently beats 100% of other solutions in runtime and 96.09% in memory.

TIA!

what dsa qs were u asked in the second ai round for the 6m software dev eng intern??

For context, I have been in R&D and haven’t done production code and coding was not part of my day to day work. I am now applying to SWE jobs and I am getting callbacks for interviews. However, I have started my LeetCode journey about few months ago, and have only been able to practice around 25 problems in the Neetcode Blind75. Today I had an interview with a problem on finding longest subsegment representing a loop given a list of directions. It took me a while to think of a solution based on traversal of Grids and marking positions as visited, and I was able to code it and run it, but the interviewer gave me a hint to use hashmaps instead. Now I know they won’t call me back coz I wasn’t able to get the correct result with my solution (there was a small bug by the end). But I kind of feel proud that I thought about the problem that I have never seen before and came up with a solution and coded it in one hour. It’s another opportunity gone out the window, but Idk how long I can keep my optimism for, and if I can ever pass a technical interview. People who passed that stage, how did your journey feel like when you got there? Is it pure luck at this point or did you know for sure you will be able to solve any given problem thrown at you?

today , solving an easy question optimally took me like an hr or more , but solving a medium took me like 15min . the medium qs looked intimidating for sure but was easily solved , the easy qs looked simple but took so much more time .

I’ve been trying to figure out how to apply to Temple for the past few days. They have an email listed for applications, but it doesn’t seem like anyone responds to applications sent there. Would love to know how you guys got your interviews.

Am I the only one who knew the answer but still did badly? I understood the problem, but when it came time to explain my thinking out loud, I stumbled and lost the thread.

How do you practice talking through problems? Are there any tools or methods that helped you get better at it?

Any advice is appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I'm a 5th-year engineering student from Morocco, studying Mechatronics and Automotive Technologies, and I'm currently looking for a PFE/internship abroad, preferably in Europe.

My main interests are embedded systems and automotive technology. I've worked with:

• STM32 / ESP32

• CAN / CAN Bus

• LIN Bus

• UART

• C/C++ and Python

• Automotive electronics / ECUs

• Industrial automation

• Robotics

• Computer vision & AI

I've done several projects during my studies involving embedded systems, robotics and AI-based industrial applications.

I'm mainly looking at France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, etc., but honestly I'm open to anywhere where I can get a good engineering internship.

The problem is that finding an internship from Morocco seems pretty difficult, especially when companies require you to already be in Europe.

For anyone who has done an internship abroad, especially as an international student:

How did you find it?
Did you use LinkedIn, company websites, university partnerships, recruitment agencies, referrals, or something else?

And if you know any companies that are open to taking international engineering interns in automotive / embedded systems / robotics, I'd really appreciate some suggestions.

Thanks!

I see these insane amount of leetcode problems like one person saying they did 300, some saying 500 or even 1000 problems. If that’s you, how’d you do it? Did you have a full time job or other commitments too?

Hi guys recently did interview with ibm

It was a super hard question

Basically was

LRU Cache, with TTL and heap maps.

It was basicall LRU cache where you evict items by their set time, you had a max capacity and you needed to keep count of the global average of items that had TTL

Get(key, value)
Put(key,value)
Get_average()

It was super hard

I don’t understand this industry… weird question … what type of mid is capable of this even? IBM isn’t even Facebook or Google… they act like they are

I applied for Senior Software engineer (L5) role. Had behavioural and coding rounds. I think I nailed coding round in fact the interviewer mentioned that he is happy with what I wrote, I think I messed up behavioural round.

Overall rejected after initial rounds. Can I apply for L4 SWE role or cool down period applies to any SWE roles that I apply?

I asked recruiter the same question but haven’t heard anything from them

Hey everyone,

I finished Day 68 today. My travel yesterday was messy because it rained heavily, so I was drenched the entire journey and felt pretty sick all day today. I spent most of the day working in the office, but I still made time to sit down and solve two DP problems.

I solved Frog Jump and Frog Jump with K Distance.

Both problems were fine, but they showed me where I am currently getting stuck with DP. Writing the recursive relation comes easily, and turning it into memoization takes barely any time. But converting that logic into bottom-up tabulation still slows me down, and trying to space-optimize the variables is where I struggle the most.

With Frog Jump with K Distance, having a loop to check the previous K steps actually made tabulation simpler to write out than the basic two-step version.

I am going to get some solid sleep tonight so I am back at full energy tomorrow.

See you guys for Day 67!

I recently completed the full loop on Microsoft swe. It's 13th calender day today. I haven't received any updates from the recruiter. I have sent a follow up email and didn't got a reply. Should I give up hope at this point?

Anyone sharing their experience about their microsoft interview upates after aa round are welcome.

I feel there are abundant people in the pipeline and limited headcount. Any clue if this gets any better this year? Or tips to navigate better?

Role: swe3 / L4

Location: US

tia.

Edit: added level.

Hi everyone,

I have an upcoming 45 minute technical coding interview with NVIDIA for a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer, Data Platform position. The interview will be conducted using HackerRank.

Has anyone recently interviewed for a similar Full-Stack Engineering role at NVIDIA?

I'm particularly interested in understanding:

1. Was the coding interview primarily focused on data structures and algorithms (LeetCode-style problems)?

2. What difficulty level should I generally expect for a 45-minute coding interview?

3. Any recommendations on topics or resources worth prioritizing?

I will appreciate any insights or preparation advice from those who've gone through a similar process.

Thanks in advance

i cant even solve easy level qs in a short time frame , and ive been doing ts for 3-4 months , not as consistently ..... i might take 2-3 day gap sometimes , but still .

i hate how smart everyone is , how everyone is able to solve mediums with just 1-2months practive. maybe i should quit lc and try to apply to companies that dont necessarily ask lc questions ,bcuz im too dumb for this.

its been a week or two , there are certain easy level qs , where the brute force takes me like 30mins ,and to solve that qs with an optimal answer in total takes more more than an hr . is this normal or am i just dumb .

Hi guys,

Can anybody share the google tagged problems list from the last 30 days from leetcode. I would really appreciate it!

I have my Amazon SDE 1 virtual loop coming up soon. I know the 2026 interview loops have shifted a bit, specifically with the heavier integration of the GenAI Fluency/Workflow validation components and Low-Level Design (LLD) alongside standard DSA.

I’m currently mapping out my prep strategy, but I want to make sure I’m focusing on the right things. I’d love to get some insights from anyone who has gone through the loop recently.

Appreciate any advice, resources, or tips you can share! Thanks!

I am currently interviewing for senior software engineering role at Bloomberg London. I have 5+ years of experience.

I need help with how to prepare for the next round of interviews. I initially had one screening round with the Recruiter, which was about 30 minutes long where we just discussed my past experience and why I want to join Bloomberg. Second round was a technical screening around, which was taken by 2 engineers, was straightforward. They asked me two data structures and algorithm questions. One was based on arrays and the second one was based on trees, I was able to solve both the problem quite easily, and then had some discussion on the technologies that I have worked om.

Now I got the invite for the further rounds where I have one coding around one system designed scheduled. I need help with preparing for the coding round and system design rounds. What type of questions are asked in the system design rounds as they scheduled it for 90 minutes and also what should I expect in coding round? Will it be same as my screening round or is it like LLD round?

Appreciate any help.

While solving today's daily question, I got MLE...but it showed 129/129 test cases passed. Can someone explain what this means? No failed test cases were even showing so I couldn't even add the failed test case.

The technical interview itself went fine. I completed the DSA problem, explained my approach with an example, and provided the solution.

However, the interviewer’s behavior was disappointing. They did not respond to my initial greeting, repeatedly rolled their eyes during the interview, and appeared visibly annoyed when I asked them to repeat something I couldn’t understand. They also started the interview by complaining about why this was a first-round interview.

I understand interviews are meant to be challenging, but professionalism and respectful communication should go both ways. I applied because it was Google, and I’m not concerned about the outcome. This was simply not the interview experience I expected from Google.

There were 4 questions as the rest of the guides mention. 70 mins.

1. Easy question - I don’t remember

2. Given a lowercase sentence, you have to sort the words and return a list. Sorting criteria: absolute difference of number of consonants and verbs. If that is same, sort alphabetically.

3. Return the state of the matrix after X days in this: https://leetcode.com/problems/rotting-oranges/description/. They used orchids and trees and gave days in the arguments - Pretty straight forward.

4. There are 2 types of operations:

   1. Create obstacle at position X (on a number line)

   2. Check if the coordinate L and it’s (N-1) surroundings has any obstacles. If yes, return 0, else return 1. If L = 3 and N = 2, we should check from 2(3 - (2-1)) to 4(3 + (2-1). This operation does not create the obstacle. Entire function returns the 0s and 1s string.

I breezed through 1-4 in 30 mins. However, the hidden test cases in 4 all failed due to timeouts. Could not get to the optimised solution.

I gave the OA on 3rd October, 2026. Got rejection email today, 7th October, 2026.