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Oracle interview notes, page 4 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

May 2026
Oracle system design round for a software engineer role, focused entirely on designing a video upload and semantic search service. It was a dense 45-60 minute session covering everything from chunked uploads to vector stores, and I felt like I was constantly one step behind the scope of what they wanted.
  • Design a video upload and semantic search service that handles user-uploaded videos and supports searching over their content.
  • Walk through the video upload path. How do you handle large files, encoding, and async processing?
  • How would you build the indexing pipeline to support semantic search over video content?
  • Describe the search path from a user query to returned video results.

“This is one of those questions that sounds manageable until you realize they want the full stack: upload pipeline, transcoding, transcription, embeddings, vector retrieval, ranking.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Oracle SWE interview, got a classic LRU cache problem. Pretty standard for this kind of role but the O(1) constraint is where things get interesting if you haven't thought about it before.
  • Design and implement an LRU cache with a fixed capacity, supporting get and put operations in O(1) average time.

“The get/put interface sounds simple enough but the O(1) requirement is what actually matters here.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026
Oracle had a coding round that threw me off a bit because it wasn't the usual leetcode grind. You get a requirements doc and an existing codebase, then you have to figure out what's missing, what's broken, and build out a CLI tool on top of it. More like real work than an interview, which I wasn't totally prepared for.
  • Given a requirements document and an existing codebase, identify which features are missing or underperforming, then implement a CLI tool that fulfills the specified requirements.
  • Walk through your strategy for reading an unfamiliar codebase. Where would you look first and why?
  • Which parts of the existing code would you refactor and what would your reasoning be?
  • How would you test the CLI tool you just built, including both the new features and the existing functionality?

“The hardest part wasn't the coding, it was figuring out where to even start reading.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Oracle for a software engineer role. Just one question about collaboration, pretty standard stuff, nothing that tripped me up too badly.
  • Tell me about a time you worked with others to tackle a difficult problem.

“Went with a story about a production bug we had to debug across two teams.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Oracle SWE interview with a classic grid traversal problem. Pretty standard coding round, nothing too wild, but it's the kind of question where you either know the pattern or you're staring at the screen hoping something clicks.
  • Given a 2D binary grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of islands, where an island is a group of horizontally or vertically connected land cells.

“I went with DFS pretty quickly, which was the right call.”

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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 follow-ups, and I spent probably too long on the wrong half of it.
  • You have 1,000,000 VMs. Design a system that collects the health status of all of them within a 5-minute window. Walk through two approaches: a central monitor polling each VM versus each VM pushing a heartbeat every 10 seconds. What breaks in each, and how do you scale the collection layer?

“I jumped straight into the push vs pull comparison which felt natural, but I underestimated how much they wanted me to stress-test the numbers.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Oracle SE interview that mixed a meaty system design question with a resume deep dive in the same round. The design problem was a hospital appointment booking API with a lot of moving parts, and you had to be ready to pivot to talking about past projects on the spot.
  • Design and implement a hospital appointment booking API. Walk through the endpoints you'd expose, the data model, and how you'd handle things like doctor availability, time slot management, and booking conflicts.
  • Walk me through a past project from your resume in detail.

“This one sprawled fast.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Oracle SWE interview with a greedy/heap problem that sounds straightforward but has a few layers to it. The question came with a lot of follow-ups baked in, which I wasn't fully expecting.
  • You have an array of non-negative integers and an integer k. Each operation lets you pick any element and replace it with the ceiling of half its value. Using at most k operations, minimize the total sum. Walk through an efficient algorithm, explain why it's correct, give the time and space complexity, and handle edge cases like zeros and very large k.

“I went straight to max-heap because you always want to halve the largest element first, and that part felt solid.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Oracle system design round for a software engineer role. One question, pretty deep, they wanted a full rate limiting design for an API gateway covering distributed setups, concurrency, observability, the works.
  • Design a rate limiting system for an API gateway that handles per-key limits (user, IP, token), correctness under concurrent and bursty traffic, multi-instance distribution, limit-exceeded responses, and configurable limits per endpoint or customer tier.

“This one sprawled fast.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Oracle for a software engineering role. One question, pretty involved, focused on cross-team collaboration and conflict. Felt like they wanted a real story, not a rehearsed answer.
  • Tell me about a time you had to work across multiple teams to ship something. What were the competing priorities, how did you get people aligned, and what was the actual outcome?

“This one has a lot of parts and I tried to hit all of them in sequence, which in retrospect made my answer feel like a checklist.”

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