Open position in Search team. Had two telephonic coding rounds before being called for onsite interview. 1st telephonic round coding question like Tree Serialize and deserialize, follow up question can the serialize string output be further compressed (which I didn’t have much time) . Then got an email from recruiter saying they want to have one more telephonic online coding round. In the second round coding problem asked was 3 sum problem with target equal to 0 and follow up was to find all possible combinations of subsets which equals target sum. Later next day got email from recruiter saying team wants to move forward with onsite interview. All the communication with regards to scheduling or any updates is done via email recruiter didn’t call to inform or have even the initial introductory call. Onsite interview email didn’t have any details apart from location and from and to time and hr contact name. Onsite interview every person who interview will give a coding question 1st round - with Engineer question like How will you identify performance problem in java application and one coding question 2nd round- with Engineer coding question like given k sorted lists get top n elements based on search score (like merge k sorted lists and select top n elements) 3rd round - with head of the team asked some general questions and then asked couple of questions like dfs coding and how to generate synonyms for search query (this question is very vague basically idea is to look at the log or user interactions in given user session time like say 10 sec and use that info to generate synonyms) 4th round lunch round with entire team , felt like they were trying to access if the potential candidate fits in the team dynamic 5th round with hiring manager general info about company and team praising about the company and informing that the potential candidate that it’s not 9-5 job and later asked coding question like sort 3 unique numbers (hint 2 pointers) 6th round with Engineer asked about coding problem like k dimensional tree or point problem not able to recollect 7th round with Engineer started to explain about employee org chat problem what data structure and if employee view manager (direct or in direct like skip level) then the profile should be colored red, if manager views direct or indirect reportee then profile color should be green else for other case blue color. Need to code data preprocessing and other logic Next couple of day later got email from recruiter informing about team passing.

Apple UK has an extremely long and unnecessarily complicated interview process. In total I had to go through 10 stages, which felt excessive. Here is the process I experienced: 1) Talent partner interview Initial screening with a recruiter. 2) Interview with future UK colleagues A higher-level technical conversation about my background, CV, and how I like to work. 3) Take-home task A relatively complex assignment. If you want to do it properly, it requires several hours of work. That said, for a company like Apple this expectation is understandable. 4) Pair programming interview If your take-home task is successful, you walk through your solution and explain your decisions. You may also be asked to extend the solution and add features during the session. 5) Behavioural interview 6) System design interview 1 7) System design interview 2 Up to this point the process was demanding but reasonable. However, the following stages were described as “just a formality”, which turned out not to be the case. 8) Face-to-face interview at the London HQ This was described as an opportunity to see the office and evaluate the commute, since the role requires working there three days per week. In practice, it turned into a 30–45 minute Q&A session where the candidate is expected to ask questions. After already completing seven rounds, it can be difficult to come up with new questions that haven’t been asked already. That said, this was actually one of the most useful conversations. The interviewer was friendly and open, and I learned more about the role in that 30–40 minutes than during the previous seven rounds. 9) Informal chat with a future team member from the US This was also described as an informal conversation. However, it included vague technical questions such as: "What components would you use in a distributed microservice-based system?" Without further context this question requires many clarifications before it can be meaningfully answered. 10) Informal chat with the future line manager This was again described as a casual introduction, but it turned into another technical discussion. One of the questions was how I would design a system that aggregates data from vehicle manufacturers worldwide and provides a unified interface for clients, even though each manufacturer exposes a different API. I suggested an adapter-based approach, where manufacturer-specific integrations translate responses into a common format. The interviewer preferred an approach where a separate service would be created for each individual manufacturer. I explained why this felt unnecessarily complex for the scenario. After the first seven rounds I had received positive feedback and was told that the remaining stages were mostly formalities. They even told me that they would send out an offer proposal, and I should not leave my current workplace just that time. If I accept that proposal, they needed to get it signed off with someone, and when that happens is the time for handing in your notice at your current workplace. In practice, these last interviews changed the course of my process. They had a second thought, and they changed their mind. It was really bad, because, I've only got a one sentence rejection after putting so much effort in the process. I'd expect them to explain why the YES turned to a NO. Overall, the process felt overly long and unnecessarily complicated, especially given the additional interviews after the core technical rounds had already been completed.