Real Interview Experiences
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“What was very unusual is they didn’t give me any tooling to draw the system design, so I just sketched it on a piece of paper and talked them through it, then we got into this oddly deep debate about whether hover-over history should count as a recommendation signal.”
“What caught me off guard was that one of the coding rounds was not generic LeetCode at all. It was AI coding, with things like sparse matrix times vector multiplication and k-nearest neighbor search, and they still wanted multiple questions under pressure.”
“The biggest surprise was that the data science round went deeper than some engineering screens I’ve done. They were asking me about golden datasets, AI eval guardrails, and even precision and recall formulas in a PM interview.”
“The coding round explicitly let me use AI, but they were not looking for a one-shot prompt. They were judging whether I could break the work down, catch the model when it went sideways, and run my own review loop while still shipping.”
“They took my Power BI project apart step by step, from ETL and Power Query to row-level security, and then switched straight into live SQL on window functions. It felt less like a trick interview and more like a full check on whether I really knew my own work.”
“The weirdest round was a principal engineer asking me to design an AI bot for ordering employee lunches. I went in expecting cloud infrastructure and Go, then suddenly I'm trying to talk through prompt behavior and architecture without getting lost in the terminology.”
“You can’t just be like, ‘Oh, I know math.’ You have to translate a business problem into algebra, keep track of the numbers, and still have the business intuition to know what the answer means.”
“Rehearsing your take-home top-down isn't actually that helpful. There were so many curveballs thrown in the middle of the jam session that it would be almost impossible to just read a script and go slide to slide — you need to be on the tip of your toes.”
“The weirdest part was that the take home was basically the job. I had to build a semantic search setup over Amazon products for ChatGPT, then walk that same solution back to the team because that is basically what they work on.”
“I walked into this thing with 48 pages of prep, and that still barely felt like enough because at Amazon the first question is maybe 20% of the interview and the other 80% is them asking, 'How do you know that? Prove it.'”
“The recruiter literally told me the system design prompt was frequency capping, and even with that heads-up the real test was whether I could talk about ads like I actually live in that world. If you get the terminology half wrong, it feels like a red flag immediately.”
