The interview process for a software engineer at Apple is structured and demanding.

It usually starts with a recruiter screening. This is a short call where the recruiter reviews your background, what kind of work you’ve done, and what type of role you’re targeting. They may ask light technical questions to see if your experience aligns with the team’s needs.

If you pass this step, you move to a technical phone or online interview where you solve one or two coding problems in real time using a shared environment like CoderPad.

These questions focus on core algorithms and data structures—things like arrays, graphs, trees, or dynamic programming. The interviewer will want you to explain your thought process, analyze complexity, and write clean, correct code.

Given an array of integers, return the length of the longest increasing subsequence.