I applied for a position on Oracle's website in August 2024, without a referral. About a month later, the recruiter contacted me to schedule a 30-minute phone screen to discuss the role, mentioning that Oracle's hiring and interview process tends to be quite slow.

The interview process included a phone screen, a technical round with the manager, and four final loop interviews (two technical, one behavioral with a bar raiser, and one system design with the hiring manager).

After the phone screen, I had my first technical round with a Software Engineering manager. He asked me a coding question related to HashMaps and dictionaries, along with some behavioral questions.

A week after this round, I hadn't received any updates, so I followed up with the recruiter. They informed me that I had passed the first round and would be scheduling the final loop interviews. These were scheduled for the second week of October.

For the final loop, my system design interview, which was originally supposed to be conducted by the hiring manager, was reassigned to another manager due to the original manager being on leave.

The loop interviews went as follows:

• First round: Two sliding window algorithm problems, which went well.
• Second round: A dynamic programming question to implement and delete a node in a Binary Search Tree (BST), which also went well.
• Third round (bar raiser): The interviewer arrived 10 minutes late and asked behavioral questions. This round went smoothly.
• Fourth round (system design): The substitute manager was friendly but seemed disinterested in my system design skills. We discussed behavioral questions for about 30 minutes before he asked me to design YouTube on paper (no whiteboard was available). Although he didn’t seem particularly engaged with the design, he appeared impressed with my communication skills.

At the end of the system design round, he mentioned that the original hiring manager was on leave and that the recruiter would be in touch regarding the next steps in a few days. I took this as a positive sign that I had passed all the interviews.

However, it has now been over two weeks since the final interviews, and I haven’t received any communication from the recruiter, despite reaching out twice. My application status still shows “interview and selection” on the careers page, so I assume they may either be interviewing more candidates or are simply moving slowly.

A dynamic programming question to implement and delete a node in a Binary Search Tree (BST).