Oracle interview notes, page 8 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

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a classic LRU cache design question. Pretty standard stuff for this kind of role but the O(1) constraint is where people either nail it or fall apart.

Design and implement an in-memory LRU cache that supports get and put operations, both running in O(1) time. The cache should evict the least recently used entry when it exceeds capacity.

“The O(1) requirement is the whole puzzle here.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview, pretty standard algorithmic round. One question, backtracking, nothing that'll surprise you if you've done any prep.

Given an array of distinct integers, write a function that returns all possible permutations of those integers.

“Classic backtracking problem.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a tree problem that looks straightforward but has a subtle recursive twist. Not the worst session I've had but the edge case caught me mid-explanation.

Given a binary tree and a target value, remove all leaf nodes equal to that target. If removing those leaves causes a parent node to become a new leaf with the same value, remove that too. Keep going until no such leaves remain. Return the modified tree.

“I coded a postorder traversal pretty fast and felt good about it.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview that came down to a single algorithmic problem. Not much ceremony around it, just the problem and figuring it out under pressure.

Find the maximum number of non-overlapping substrings from a given string such that each substring contains all occurrences of its characters.

“This one took me a while to even understand what was being asked.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Behavioral round at Oracle for a software engineer role. One question, pretty standard incident-handling territory, but it pushed harder than I expected on the customer communication piece.

Tell me about a time you or your team caused a failure that impacted customers. How did you handle the immediate fallout, communicate with affected users, and make sure it didn't happen again? What did you take away from it?

“I had a decent story about a bad deploy that took down a feature for a few hours.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview that came down to a classic LRU cache problem with a follow-up that actually had some teeth to it. Pretty standard coding round overall but the TTL extension kept things interesting.

Design and implement an LRU cache class with get and put operations, both running in O(1) average time.
How would you extend the LRU cache to support per-entry expiration (TTL)? Walk through the tradeoffs between different approaches.

“Knew this one cold.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a classic array partitioning problem. Pretty algorithmic, nothing flashy, but the follow-ups pushed harder than I expected.

Given an integer array, partition it so all even numbers appear before all odd numbers. You can swap any two elements at any positions. What is the minimum number of swaps needed?
How would you modify the approach to produce a stable partition, preserving the original relative order within the even and odd groups?
How would you generalize this partitioning logic to work with an arbitrary predicate instead of even/odd?

“Two pointers from opposite ends, left skips past evens, right skips past odds, and when both land on violations you swap and count it.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview with a graph/scheduling problem that looked straightforward on the surface but had a few wrinkles worth knowing about going in.

Given n courses labeled 0 through n-1 and a list of prerequisite pairs, return any valid ordering in which all courses can be completed. Print the final order.

“They threw in a simplifying constraint: each course has at most one direct prerequisite, so the graph is actually a forest rather than a general DAG.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Oracle SWE interview that focused on tree problems. The main question was about comparing two N-ary trees, and they pushed pretty hard on both a recursive and iterative solution plus complexity analysis.

Given two N-ary trees, write a function to determine if they are identical in structure and node values.
Now implement the same tree comparison iteratively, without recursion.
What is the time and space complexity of your recursive and iterative solutions?

“Recursive solution came to me pretty fast: both null means true, one null means false, values differ means false, child list lengths differ means false, then recurse on each pair of children.”

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Oracle·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Oracle for a software engineer role. One big open-ended question that basically ate the whole session. Felt like a lot to cover in the time given.

Walk through the system design of a recent project you owned. Cover functional and non-functional requirements, high-level architecture including services, data stores, and messaging, and explain how data flows through the system. Also discuss scaling strategies, consistency vs availability trade-offs, schema decisions, performance bottlenecks, failure handling, observability, and why you made the key design choices you did.

“This was basically the whole interview in one prompt.”

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