Apple

FAANG / Big Tech

Most of these Apple write-ups come from Software Engineers (212), then Machine Learning Engineers (85) and Data Scientists (32). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (217), the system design round (48), the product sense round (29) and the behavioral / leadership round (22).

372 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Apple·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Sep 2026

Went through the full Apple panel for a senior SWE role, five rounds back to back, all coding heavy. The first few rounds felt solid but the last two got messy in ways I keep replaying in my head.

Given a working code solution, how does your approach change if the input data is modified in a specific way?
Design an architecture for a given system, write your solution, and then write test cases to validate it.

“This is where things went sideways.”

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Apple·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Aug 2026

Got my team match for Apple's IS&T org and now prepping for a three-round SRE panel: a hiring manager behavioral screen, a technical coderpad round, and a shorter early career community behavioral chat. The req emphasizes Linux, Python automation, incident response, and troubleshooting, but I'm still trying to figure out whether the coding round leans LeetCode-style DSA or more scripting and ops problems.

What is the coderpad technical round actually like for this role? Is it standard algorithm problems or does it lean toward scripting and automation given the Python and Linux focus?
How much do the technical questions focus on incident response and troubleshooting versus general software engineering concepts?

“This is the thing keeping me up.”

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Apple·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Aug 2026

Apple coding interview that turned into an OS theory session. The interviewer spent the first half grilling me on systems concepts, left barely enough time for the actual coding problem, then apparently marked me on how I did with the coding. Got the rejection today and I'm still annoyed about it.

How does virtual memory work, and what happens during a page fault?
What is the difference between a mutex and a semaphore?
What is priority inversion and how is it addressed?
Solve a two-part graph problem (details not specified).

“This went on way longer than I expected.”

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Apple·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Aug 2026

Five rounds at Apple for a senior iOS role, heavy on SwiftUI and architecture. Most of it went well but two coding rounds left me feeling like I talked a better game than I actually coded, which is a rough place to be when you're waiting on a decision.

Implement an async image loader that handles concurrency, cancellation, partial failures, stale results, and ordering.
Design and implement a vending machine, including core logic and unit tests.

“My reasoning here was actually solid.”

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Apple·Software Engineer·Executive / Final Round

Aug 2026

Just wrapped up the final round for a hardware engineer role at Apple in Cupertino and now I'm spiraling about whether my RSU ask was way off base.

What are your salary and equity expectations for this role?

“Recruiter asked for numbers and I went with what levels.fyi showed as averages.”

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Apple·Data Scientist·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026

Apple DS interview that was basically three coding tasks back to back, SQL and Python both fair game. Nothing too wild but the third problem had me second-guessing my greedy approach the whole time.

Given an employees table with salaries, return the second highest distinct salary, or NULL if one doesn't exist.
You have a users table and a user_events table. Merge them so each event row includes user attributes, keeping only events with a matching user.
Given a list of employees with salaries and a total budget B, find the maximum number of employees you can hire without exceeding the budget.

“Pretty classic, but the NULL edge case is where people trip up.”

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Apple·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Apple Data Scientist technical screen, one coding question centered on sliding window stuff. Pretty straightforward session, felt more like a warm-up than a deep technical grilling.

You have an array of positive integers where each value represents website hits in a given minute. Given a window size k, find the maximum total hits across any contiguous window of length k. What's the time and space complexity of your solution?

“Knew the sliding window trick going in, so I coded it up pretty fast.”

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Apple·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Got a coding question for an Analytics Engineer role at Apple that was more Python OOP than I expected. The problem wasn't crazy hard but the constraints tripped me up a bit.

Given a Parent class that precomputes a frequency dictionary from a list, implement a `most_frequent_key()` method in a Child subclass that returns all keys tied for the highest frequency, in order of first appearance, without using `max()` or `collections.Counter`.

“The no-`max()` constraint is what got me thinking for a second.”

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Apple·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Apple ML engineer interview with a coding problem centered on implementing a TF-IDF scorer from scratch. The problem looked like a search relevance exercise but had enough edge cases in the math to keep things interesting.

Implement a simplified TF-IDF scorer: given a list of documents and a query string, compute a score for each document using term frequency and smoothed inverse document frequency, then return the document indices sorted by descending score, breaking ties by smaller index.

“The formula they gave had that +1 smoothing on both numerator and denominator of the IDF, plus an extra +1 added to the whole log.”

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Apple·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Apple data scientist interview, technical phone screen focused on ML pipelines. One big open-ended question about building a churn model end-to-end in scikit-learn. Felt more like a design conversation than a coding test, which I wasn't fully prepared for.

Walk through how you'd build a churn-prediction pipeline from scratch in scikit-learn, covering preprocessing, model selection, hyperparameter tuning, and packaging it for production.

“This was basically the whole interview.”

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Apple interview FAQ

What rounds are in the Apple interview?

Candidates most often report a technical phone screen (217 write-ups), a system design round (48), a product sense round (29) and a behavioral / leadership round (22).

What does the Apple technical phone screen cover?

Across 217 technical phone screen write-ups, the most tagged question topics are Technical Trade-offs (218 questions), Algorithms & Data Structures (187) and System Design (120).

What is asked in the Apple system design round?

Across 48 system design write-ups, the most tagged question topics are System Design (99 questions), Technical Trade-offs (90) and Data Modeling (25).