Oracle interview notes, page 1 of 9

Large Enterprises

Most of these Oracle write-ups come from Software Engineers (83), then Machine Learning Engineers (2) and Data Scientists (1). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (52), the system design round (14), the behavioral / leadership round (12) and the hiring manager screen (3).

87 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

System design round at Oracle for a software engineer role. The whole thing was a job scheduler question and they wanted a lot of ground covered fast, so pacing was a real issue.

Design a job scheduler system from scratch. Walk through functional requirements, architecture, and how jobs get dispatched to workers.
How would you handle retries and job dependencies in your scheduler design?
How do you scale the scheduler itself and ensure high availability?
What happens when the scheduler misses a scheduled run? How do you decide between catch-up and skip?
What metrics and observability would you build into this system?
Compare a pull-based versus push-based dispatch model for sending jobs to workers.

“I started with the data model which felt right but I spent too long on it and barely had time for the dispatch path.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026

Behavioral round at Oracle for a software engineer role. Pretty much one meaty question about how you handle competing priorities, with a follow-up pushing for a real example.

Walk me through how you prioritize when multiple things feel equally urgent. What's your actual decision process, and can you give a specific example where you had to make a tough call and live with the result?

“The concrete example part is what tripped me up.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a string decoding problem. Pretty classic stack-based question but the nested case tripped me up a bit.

Given an encoded string in the format k[encoded_string] where the string inside brackets is repeated k times, write a function to decode it. Handle nested encodings like '3[a2[c]]'.

“The basic case was fine, I traced through '3[a]2[bc]' pretty quickly with a stack.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle SWE coding round, one problem the whole time. Involved some OOP design work plus array processing, which I wasn't expecting to be combined like that.

You're given a list of items with unit prices, a list of discounts keyed by item name, and a shopping list that may contain duplicates. Implement a ShoppingItem class that extends an abstract base class (using the parent's getter methods, not protected fields directly), then for each distinct item in the shopping list return a tuple of item name, discounted unit price, and total price. Results sorted by item name.

“The OOP part tripped me up more than the logic did.”

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Oracle·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle ML Engineer interview, technical phone screen focused on implementing multi-head self-attention from scratch. Pretty deep dive for a single question, they clearly wanted to see if you actually understood the internals rather than just calling PyTorch APIs.

Implement multi-head self-attention in PyTorch or NumPy from scratch (no built-in attention modules). Walk through projecting inputs into Q, K, V, reshaping for multiple heads, computing scaled dot-product attention, and merging heads back with a final projection. Also discuss causal and padding masking, and the computational complexity.

“This wrecked me a little.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a single coding problem. Not much to report, pretty standard stuff.

Solve a LeetCode-style coding problem.

“Pretty straightforward coding question, nothing tricky about the setup.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Apr 2026

Hiring manager round at Oracle for a software engineer role, conducted by someone with a scientist background. The interviewer went deep on project details, technical challenges, and how you handled cross-team coordination. Come with real stories, not vague answers.

Walk me through a technical challenge you faced in a past project and how you resolved it.
How did you align with other teams when working on a cross-functional project?
What do you consider a core personal strength, and can you give a concrete example of it in action?
Tell me about a time you took ownership of something that wasn't strictly your responsibility.

“The scientist background made this feel more like a peer review than a typical manager chat.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle backend engineer interview with a graph/cycle detection problem. Pretty standard algorithmic round, nothing too wild, but it's the kind of question that trips you up if you haven't thought about topological sort recently.

Given a list of jobs and their dependencies (each job requires another to finish first), determine whether it's possible to complete all jobs.

“Classic cycle detection in a directed graph.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026

Behavioral round at Oracle for a SWE role, just the one question about handling shifting project goals. Pretty standard stuff but I fumbled it more than I expected.

Tell me about a time when the goals of a project changed mid-way and how you dealt with it.

“I had a story ready but it wasn't tight enough.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle SWE coding round, basically one algorithmic problem the whole time. Classic container with most water, but they wanted O(n) specifically so you couldn't brute force your way through it.

Given an array of integers representing heights of vertical lines, find the two lines that form a container holding the maximum amount of water. Must be solved in O(n) time.

“The O(n) constraint is what makes this worth thinking about.”

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