Interview guides

Anthropic's loop is recruiter screen → a CodeSignal-style 90-minute Python coding assessment (not every candidate gets one) → 1–2 phone screens → a virtual onsite of four or five rounds..

OpenAI's loop is typically a recruiter chat → phone screens (for software engineers most often one coding round and one system design round, about 60 minutes each; ML roles get ML coding) → a 4–5 round virtual onsite with a hiring manager round at the start or end..

Waymo's loop is recruiter contact → a technical phone screen (45 minutes of live coding in most reports — BFS/graph problems and pure-Python data processing are the recurring themes) → a virtual onsite of usually four rounds mixing coding, system design, a technical deep dive, and a hiring-manager behavioral..

xAI's loop opens with a 15-minute engineer phone screen that follows a consistent script — self-introduction, most-challenging-project deep dive, and 'why xAI / what would you do here' — though reports also describe surprise coding prompts replacing the chat entirely..

Perplexity's loop opens with a recruiter chat and moves quickly into a coding round (a live phone screen or an OA), then an onsite..

Mercor's loop opens with a ~30-minute technical phone screen that is entirely verbal: about four rapid-fire questions (sorting theory, a probability puzzle, code reviews of a threaded cache and a CSV writer, an idempotent payment call), answered as many as you can in the time, and two candidates report failing after answering three..

Most Palantir loops open with a recruiter call, and the reports agree on what it tests: why Palantir, specifically..

Harvey's loop is unusually predictable, and the reports say so directly: twelve of the threads in this corpus describe the question they got as the old one already posted on the forum..

Roblox runs a conventional loop with an unusually concentrated question set..

Zip (ZipHQ) is a procurement-automation startup, and its loop is front-loaded on the phone screen: more of the reported rejections come there than at the onsite..

Robinhood's loop is a recruiter call, a technical phone screen, and a virtual onsite of three to four rounds — typically coding, a project deep dive, and system design..

Databricks' loop is a recruiter call, one technical phone screen, and a virtual onsite of two coding rounds, a system design round, and a behavioral or hiring-manager round..

Snowflake's loop leans harder on the technical screen than most..

Scale AI's loop is built from practical rounds rather than LeetCode..

Cursor's process runs one round at a time: each round is scheduled only after you pass the one before, so it can take weeks..

Rippling's loop is built mostly on practical, multi-part coding rather than LeetCode..

Amazon's process starts with an online assessment..

Capital One's software engineering process usually starts with a CodeSignal online assessment of four tasks in 70 minutes, mostly array, string and matrix problems..

Most reported Ramp rounds are practical coding tasks rather than algorithm puzzles..

Reported Uber software engineering loops are mostly algorithm and object-oriented coding rounds plus system design..

Reported DoorDash software engineering loops are practical rather than LeetCode-style..

Reported Microsoft software engineering loops vary by team and by route..

Reported Google software engineering loops start with the Google Hiring Assessment, a work-style questionnaire with no coding, and some new grad and early career candidates also take a two-problem coding assessment on HackerRank..

Citadel's software loop varies more by role and by firm than most..