Oracle interview notes, page 2 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·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a linked list merging problem that had a twist I wasn't fully expecting. The core algorithm wasn't too bad but the tie-breaking rule added a layer that tripped me up at first.

Given k sorted singly linked lists where each node holds a key-value pair, merge them into a single sorted list. If the same key appears in multiple lists, the value from the higher-indexed list should win. What's your approach and complexity?

“My first instinct was just a standard k-way merge with a min-heap and I started coding that up before fully reading the tie-breaking part.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a data structures problem that looked deceptively simple but had a real O(1) constraint that forced you to think carefully about how you track state. One question, but it had enough depth to keep me busy for a while.

Design a data structure that tracks a stream of user login events and supports two O(1) operations: recording a login for a user ID, and returning the earliest user who has logged in exactly once so far.

“I got the basic idea pretty fast.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Oracle SWE coding round, one greedy algorithm problem. Pretty standard stuff but the O(n) insight is the kind of thing that separates a clean answer from a brute-force mess.

There are n gas stations arranged in a circle. Each station gives you some gas and each leg of the journey costs some gas. Starting with an empty tank, find the index of the station from which you can complete the full loop without running out of gas, or return -1 if it's impossible.

“The brute force is obvious and wrong for an interview.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Interviewed for a software engineer role at Oracle. Single question, behavioral-ish but with a technical problem-solving angle. Felt more like a structured thinking exercise than a coding screen.

When you run into a problem you don't fully understand and don't have enough information to scope it properly, how do you go about solving it? Walk through your process for gathering context, narrowing down unknowns, prototyping, and knowing when to ask for help. Give a concrete example.

“I had a real example ready but fumbled the structure a bit.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a string manipulation problem that sounds straightforward until you actually sit with it for a minute.

Given a string, count the number of substrings that contain all five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and consist only of vowels.

“My first instinct was a brute force with nested loops and I just went with it.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Oracle SWE interview with three coding and design problems. The questions ranged from classic data structure implementation to a slightly tricky array optimization problem. Nothing too wild but the second question had a subtle edge case that I think I fumbled.

Design and implement an autocomplete service with an insert(word) method and a suggest(prefix) method that returns up to five words starting with that prefix. Use a trie, explain your ordering strategy, and analyze time and space complexity.
Given an array of integer values and a parallel array of 0/1 flags indicating whether each index is already decrypted, plus an integer k, find the maximum score you can achieve by selecting at most one contiguous subarray of length at most k and treating all its indices as decrypted. Score is the sum of values at all decrypted indices. Solve in O(n).
Given a list of closed integer ranges, merge all overlapping or adjacent ranges and return the result sorted by start. Two ranges should merge if they touch, meaning the end of one is at least the start of the next minus one. Implement the function and analyze complexity.

“I'd done trie problems before so this felt familiar at first.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Oracle SWE interview, just one coding question about merging two sorted linked lists. Pretty standard stuff, nothing too wild.

Given two sorted linked lists, merge them into a single sorted linked list.

“Classic problem and I still fumbled the pointer logic the first time through.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Oracle for a software engineer role. One big question, lots of depth expected, and they really wanted to see you sweat the details on geo-spatial indexing and real-time scale.

Design a ride-sharing platform similar to Uber, covering driver matching, real-time location tracking, trip lifecycle, pricing, and payment.

“I started with the trip lifecycle which felt natural but in hindsight I should've anchored on the geo-spatial layer first since that's clearly where the interesting tradeoffs live.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026

Hiring manager behavioral round at Oracle for a software engineering role. Pretty standard set of questions, nothing unexpected, but you really need concrete numbers ready or it falls flat.

Tell me about yourself and walk me through your most impactful project.
Describe a time you had a conflict with a peer or manager and how you handled it.
Tell me about a difficult trade-off you had to make.
Walk me through a project that failed and what you took away from it.
How do you prioritize your work when multiple things feel equally urgent?
Why do you want to work at this company and specifically on this team?

“The 'most impactful' part is where people trip up, including me.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

Oracle system design round, one question about handling fault tolerance for large file uploads. Pretty focused session, no fluff.

How would you design a fault-tolerant system for uploading large files?

“My first instinct was chunked uploads with retry logic, which is the obvious answer, but I kept second-guessing whether to go deeper on the storage layer or focus on the client-side resumability.”

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