Apple Onsite Software Engineer Interview Experience: Four Coding Rounds and Behavioral Assessment
Interview Experience
Onsite 4 rounds of coding + 1 round of behavioral questions The following content requires a score higher than 150. You can already view it. Ot: Vending machine
Coding Given a number n and a coin va
Full Details
Onsite 4 rounds of coding + 1 round of behavioral questions The following content requires a score higher than 150. You can already view it. Ot: Vending machine
Coding Given a number n and a coin value, find the combination. Both DFS and DP can be used. Design an automated testing system. High-level design, specifying which modules are needed.
Coding An actual use case within the team. DFS can also be used.
Behavioral round: Although it's called behavioral, it also tested some technical skills. A rather unusual question was: BST VS Black-Red Tree and their unique implementation. Some questions related to the resume were asked, including one coding question: Given a number n, for number 1 to n Find an arr list where arr[i] + arr[i+1] is a square number. Also, some resume-related questions were asked, including one coding question: Given a tree, find the maximum val path and maximum val. In reality, it was two separate questions. The tree construction method also had to be written manually, and then DFS was used. This group really likes to test DFS... A little rant: Apple is really lazy. Almost all the interviewers were late, every round of interviews ran overtime, and one interviewer didn't show up, and the recruiter was nowhere to be found. They didn't reply to emails, didn't answer phone calls, and I finally managed to get through to the rescheduled meeting via iMessage. I just received a rejection email. Whether I get the offer or not doesn't really matter. Just a heads-up for those who are lured by the Apple halo but don't understand the job responsibilities: it's basically a menial job, essentially supporting the hardware team. There's little room for growth. The daily work involves writing various tool scripts. There's no project manager; you have to get requirements from the hardware team yourself. A friend who previously worked in a similar role at a semiconductor company commented: even an automation engineer wouldn't do it. Please give me some points to see other interview experiences!
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a apple interview for a swe role during the behavioral round reported in 2025.
It covers the following topics: Dynamic Programming, Binary Tree, Tree, Dfs, Bst, Dynamic Programming, Graph, Backtracking .
About Apple Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Apple. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Apple are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Apple interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Apple reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Apple Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Apple reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.