Apple Interview Questions
The coding and system-design questions asked in Apple interviews - with worked solutions, in-browser code execution, and active-recall review. 5 questions.
How Apple interviews software engineers
Apple's process is highly team-dependent: a recruiter screen, one or two CoderPad technical screens, then an onsite of six to eight rounds. Most candidates go through five to seven rounds total, and the loop typically runs four to eight weeks.
Because hiring is team-by-team, the loop for Core OS looks very different from App Store or Maps. The onsite is long (often 6+ hours), with multiple behavioral rounds, a hiring-manager round, system design, and coding - so domain fit and how you work matter as much as raw algorithms.
The interview loop
- 1Recruiter screen15-30 min on background, motivation, comp expectations, and why Apple.
- 2Technical phone screenOne or two CoderPad coding rounds (30-60 min), sometimes with a panel; LeetCode-medium or domain-specific tasks.
- 3Onsite loop6-8 rounds over 6+ hours: multiple behavioral rounds, a hiring-manager round, system design, and coding.
What they look for
- Strong coding plus depth in the specific team's domain
- Collaboration and craft - Apple weights behavioral rounds heavily
- Fit with the particular team you're interviewing for
How to prepare
- Research the exact team and tailor your domain prep - the loop varies wildly by org.
- Prepare for several behavioral rounds, not just one.
- Practice on CoderPad-style shared editors with a single clean solution.
Sources
- interviewing.io - Apple hiring process - How team-dependent the loop is, with questions.
- IGotAnOffer - Apple interview process & timeline - Seven-step process and timeline.
- Exponent - Apple interview process - Round overview and top questions.
See every company's references on the interview-process sources page.
Practice questions
- Newsfeed App(premium)
Design an Android social feed - opaque cursor pagination over Paging 3 + RemoteMediator, optimistic engagement with idempotent retries, 60 FPS mixed-media scrolling with autoplay video, and pull-to-refresh that surfaces new posts without losing the reading position.
Mobilehard-2mo
+7 - Valid Parentheses
Stack-walk a bracket string to validate it, then localize the first error, then find the longest valid substring (LC 32).
Practicalmedium35m2mo+12 - Find Duplicate Files(premium)
Group identical files by content. Stream-hash to keep memory bounded, then add size pre-filtering and an opt-in symlink/min-size policy.
Practicalmedium45m2mo
+4 - Time-Based Key-Value Store(premium)
A key-value store with timestamped writes. Read at time t returns the latest value written at or before t; later phases add arbitrary-order inserts and range queries.
Practicalmedium35m2mo
+9 - Meeting Rooms(premium)
Given a list of half-open meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms; later phases assign specific room IDs and add capped capacity with priority eviction.
Practicalmedium35m2mo+9