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Apple interview notes, page 37 of 38

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·Data Scientist·Recruiter / HR Screen

Jul 2026
Phone behavioral screen for a Data Scientist role at Apple. Pretty short call, just one question but it required some real prep to not sound generic.
  • Why do you want to work at Apple, and which of Apple's values connect with your past work?

“I had a decent answer prepared but partway through I realized I was just listing values without actually tying them to anything real.”

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Apple·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Apple ML engineer interview, system design round focused on on-device image processing. The question was dense and covered a lot of ground, felt like they were testing whether you could actually ship something constrained rather than just talk theory.
  • You're building an image filter feature that runs entirely on-device. Users expect preview latency under 30ms, low memory overhead, and minimal battery drain. Walk through how you'd optimize the filter pipeline without sacrificing visual quality, covering algorithm selection, numerical precision, CPU vs GPU vs accelerator usage, memory layout, tiling or streaming strategies, thermal constraints, and quality measurement.

“This was a lot to hold in your head at once.”

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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·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·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·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·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·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·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·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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