Oracle interview notes, page 6 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 - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Oracle software engineer interview focused on deep project dives, with interviewers probing hard on both technical decisions and leadership behaviors. Felt less like a standard behavioral round and more like a deposition about your past work.

Walk me through a project you worked on in depth: what was the goal, the scope, the constraints, and specifically what your role was?
What was the hardest technical challenge you faced on that project, and how did you diagnose and fix it?
Tell me about a time you had to get alignment across teams, especially where priorities were conflicting or ownership was unclear.
Give me an example where you took ownership of something outside your direct responsibilities.
What are your strongest personal qualities as an engineer, and can you back that up with a specific example?
How has your career progressed, and how do you actively seek out feedback to grow?
How do you approach a system or design review, either running one or participating in one? What do you look for and how do you incorporate feedback?

“This is the anchor question that everything else branches off from.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview that was pretty much all linked list problems. Started simple then escalated fast into K-way merging with complexity analysis. Not the most creative problem set but they clearly wanted to see if you could reason through tradeoffs, not just code.

Given two sorted linked lists, merge them into a single sorted linked list.
Follow-up: how would you extend the two-list merge to handle K sorted linked lists? Walk through both a divide-and-conquer approach and a min-heap approach, and compare their complexities.

“Pretty standard warm-up.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a meaty system design coding question around log parsing and querying. Felt more like a take-home problem squeezed into a live session, lots of follow-up angles to cover.

Build a log parser that converts raw log lines into structured records with timestamp, level, and message fields. Then design an API with an insert method and a query method that filters by time range and optionally by log level. Walk through timestamp parsing, timezone handling, malformed line handling, large-scale data strategies, and complexity analysis. Include basic tests.

“This was a lot to fit into one question.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE coding round, pretty standard stuff. One algorithm question and that was basically it.

Given a string containing only bracket characters ('(', ')', '{', '}', '[', ']'), write a function to determine whether the string is valid. A string is valid if every opening bracket is closed by the same type of bracket and in the correct order.

“Classic stack problem.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

Oracle system design round for a SWE role. One question, pretty open-ended, and I felt like I was winging it the whole time.

Design a restaurant review platform similar to Yelp.

“I jumped straight into the database schema and kind of forgot to clarify scope first.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a monotonic stack problem that's basically LC 1944 but extended to count visibility in both directions. Not the hardest round I've had but the twist caught me off guard for a minute.

Given an array of distinct heights representing people standing in a line, return an array where each entry is the total number of people that person can see, counting both left and right directions. A person A can see person B if everyone standing strictly between them is shorter than the shorter of A and B.

“I knew the one-directional version of this problem so my first instinct was to just write that and call it done.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a sliding window coding problem. Nothing too surprising but it required knowing your character frequency tricks cold.

Given two strings s and p, find all starting indices in s where a substring is an anagram of p.

“Classic sliding window.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE coding round, one problem the whole session. Not a brutal interview but the problem had enough edge cases to trip you up if you weren't careful about the counting logic.

Given a list of phrases and a list of words, for each phrase count how many distinct phrases can be formed by replacing every word that has an anagram in the word list with any of its anagrams. Words with no anagram match stay fixed. If no word in the phrase can be replaced at all, return 0 for that phrase.

“The multiplication part clicked pretty fast.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview, got a classic LRU cache design question. Pretty standard for this kind of role but the O(1) constraint is where things get interesting if you haven't thought it through before.

Design and implement an LRU cache with get and put operations, both running in O(1) average time complexity.

“The part that trips people up isn't the cache logic itself, it's the O(1) eviction.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

Oracle system design round for a software engineering role. The whole thing was basically one long deep-dive on rate limiting, which sounds narrow until you realize how many directions they can pull it.

Design a rate limiter that decides whether to allow or reject requests based on per-user or per-API-key limits. Walk through the algorithms you'd consider and the trade-offs between them.
Where would you place the rate limiter in the request path, and what are the pros and cons of each placement option?
How would you implement distributed rate limiting across multiple service instances, and how do you handle consistency and clock skew?
How do you handle burst traffic and ensure fairness across different tenants in your rate limiter design?
What observability and metrics would you build into a rate limiter, and how should the system respond to rejected requests?

“I started with fixed window because it's easy to explain, but they pushed back pretty fast asking what happens at the boundary.”

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