Dislaimer
This will be my own personal experience on how the Apple Engineering Interview looks like. I do not represent Apple in any form, and this article will not talk about any specific questions that were asked during the interview.
I’ve been interviewed by Apple for several different roles in the past few months, all related to engineering, with those three managed to get into the onsite stage, one of which I got an offer from.
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Software Engineer - Core OS
- Software Build Engineer - OS
In general, from my personal experience, I have a recruiter phone screen, coding interview(s), and finally onsite. However it depends on the team as well. Apple’s interview style is a bit different than other company that I’ve been interviewed with before. My suggestion is always ask questions if you’re not sure about how the hiring process will look like, your recruiter will be your best friend to whom you can ask about the hiring process or if you need other help in another form.
Coding interview(s) varied accross different team, with most of the question will require problem solving skills including implementation detals which covers alrorithm and data structure. Some of the team will ask a deeper questions about computer science fundamentals in various form. Before doing the interview it’s better to try clarify things that probably still a bit unclear to you, eg. what kind of language programming that you can use or if there’s a technical interview taht require you to be more practical like dealing with shell environment and stuff ask about the specification details that you should have in order to get a good interview experience.
On the onsite stage, the questions you’ll run into onsite will vary, but be sure to study CS fundamentals and systems design. From my experience I also have behavioral interview for each of the role that I’ve been interviewed with. During the coding inteview(s) that I have some of the team will require me to use specific programming language depends on the role specification. Usually onsite interview will have 4 - 5 interviews with fellow engineer and/or managers.