Facing the system design question about building a recommendation system, I felt a wave of relief — it was the same type of problem I'd just practiced on prachub.com a few days prior. The interview kicked off with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical round where I was pressed on algorithm efficiency and model evaluation metrics. They drilled down into handling sparse data and cold-start issues, making me think critically. After a grueling but rewarding process, I was thrilled to receive an offer, which I gladly accepted.

Online questionnaire, interview with a hiring manager. Thorough final interview process involving five/six interviews at the final stage covering machine learning, algorithms, engineering, and statistics, as well as presenting some of my projects.

My interview experience with Oracle was very disappointing. The meeting was rescheduled just 30 minutes before the original time, forcing me to reorganize my entire week at the last minute. I had planned carefully around this interview, and that kind of last-minute change shows a lack of consideration for candidates’ time. During the first interview, I was told the next step would be a casual conversation with the hiring manager — a chance to get to know each other. Instead, I joined the meeting and was met by someone I hadn’t been introduced to, who wasn’t mentioned in the invite, and who turned out to be the team lead for the position. That lack of transparency immediately put me in an awkward position. The interview then shifted to technical questions I hadn’t been told to prepare for, which made the whole experience feel disorganized and misleading. I’m juggling multiple processes across different companies, and I expect clarity about who I’m meeting and what the interview will focus on. Oracle failed to provide that. Even if I had been invited to continue, I wouldn’t have accepted — this experience gave me a very poor impression of how Oracle treats candidates and manages its internal processes.