A Senior Engineer’s Guide to Apple's Interview Process And Questions

Apple's interview process and questions

Apple’s interview process consists of the following steps:

• Recruiter call OR online assessment
• Technical phone screen (if you didn’t do the online assessment)
• Onsite interview

Before we get into the details of each of these steps, here are a few general notes about Apple’s hiring process, evaluation criteria, and interview experience.

Humans in groups act out a chosen metaphor; Apple isn’t a sports team. They’re an army. Their army is made up of people obsessed with making great products. And they look to hire people who’ve embedded Apple products into their lives. Armies reward loyalty more than sports teams. Apple also has the longest tenured employees in FAANG (we're including Microsoft with FAANG for the purposes of this guide).

Apple is decentralized and lets candidates interview with different teams concurrently; if you want to maximize your odds interview with as many teams as you have the appetite for.

Apple’s interview process is more like what you might see at a startup than any other FAANG – from assigning which questions to ask to interviewer training to how hiring decisions get made. Significant inter-team variance is the norm, with each team essentially acting like a startup that’s coming up with its own way of conducting interviews.

Apple is the most likely to shock you; they’re more likely to ask you something you didn’t prepare for. Out of all the FAANGs, they’re the ones you can expect to do something unexpected, and some of their tactics can seem mercenary. Apple is the only FAANG which sometimes has a process to cut interviews short if the candidate clearly isn’t meeting the bar – if you don't perform above the bar for the first half of the interview, they’ll cancel the rest.

Apple is not results or process oriented. They’re motivation oriented. In other words, they care more about the “Why” than the “What” or the “How”, and as such, they value behavioral interviews more than coding.

Apple employees are obsessed with privacy. It’s not just marketing lip service. When asked if “privacy” is a buzzword at Apple, our interviewers said…

Step 1: Recruiter call

Please see the section above called “A note about recruiter calls” for what to expect. We do encourage you to ask your recruiter what to expect for the rest of the process because as you’ll see, there is a lot of variance from team to team.

Step 2: Technical phone interview

Like everything else at Apple, the format and technical questions presented in Apple phone screens can vary a ton. Verify this by asking your recruiter!

Technical phone screens are coding interviews that range from 30 minutes to an hour. This tech interview may be between you and a single interviewer or sometimes a panel of interviewers. It may even be a hiring manager screen with a mix of behavioral questions and coding.

In any case, the general format is a shared coding environment where the interviewer(s) can assess your ability to utilize basic data structures and algorithms concepts. Being able to provide a solution for coding questions and quickly analyze the runtime complexity of your solution are key skills to have going into this interview.

The tooling used in Apple’s technical interview rounds depends on the team you’re interviewing with, but we’ve heard that some teams use CoderPad.

(In some cases) Step 2.5: Take-home assignment

Some teams give candidates a take-home assignment. They can give this around the same time they schedule a phone screen. The hiring manager is usually the person to decide whether or not candidates get one.

Step 3: Onsite

There will be roughly six to eight in-person rounds of interviews, each of which will be with your future teammates. Each round will have least one, or possibly two, interviewers.

Note that an onsite loop with one team at Apple will look very different than an onsite loop with another.

Apple’s interview types in detail

Interviewers can ask whatever behavioral, coding, or system design questions they want; there is no standardization for Apple interview questions. However, before an interview loop takes place, some teams will do a quick, informal assignment of what kinds of questions each interviewer is supposed to ask so that they don’t all end up asking the same things.

Moreover, Apple interviewers are untrained, and as soon as a senior engineer is hired they can start conducting interviews.

Apple’s unpredictable nature makes it so some of their interview rounds can’t be categorized into behavioral, coding, or system design. Is a philosophical question about products a behavioral question? Not really. But they might ask one in a behavioral round. Are rapid fire infrastructure-focused open-ended trivia questions more system design or coding? It depends.

For example, here’s how one Apple interviewer describes the behind-the-scenes top-down directive before an upcoming onsite. “Go find a question that would be a good one to ask for our team.” That interviewer then ran it up the chain to an engineer above them. Then, that question immediately got asked in the next interview.

At Apple, each interview loop is specific to the needs of individual hiring managers – there is no canonical “Apple interview”, and everything is “made to order” for each specific team. That makes it difficult for candidates to prepare.

Coding

Some teams at Apple prefer practical rounds. Sometimes, they’ll have you write a program on your own laptop and IDE. Other times, they’ll spend the whole round deep diving into a specific technology/use case that’s relevant for their team. For example, a team that wrote in Java and did a lot of work with concurrency had a whole round focused on concurrency in Java!

Other teams do medium-ish LeetCode-style questions.

At the end of the day, these interviews vary so widely it’s hard to give a specific directive, other than: ask your recruiter. For senior and above candidates, it’s more about demonstrating competence rather than needing to ace the question.

For everything you need to prepare for Apple’s coding interview, check out the section called "Apple coding interview preparation resources" below.

System design

Apple interviewers tend to ask questions relevant to a specific team’s work. For instance, a team focused on building web services will tend to ask questions about that, while front-end teams may ask UI-related questions. It may be good to try to get a feel for the day-to-day work from the recruiter/hiring manager, as the job descriptions are not always the most helpful (remember: privacy!).

Behavioral

Apple’s most important round is usually behavioral or system design. Behavioral rounds are more important than coding rounds.

An interesting paradox at Apple is: they highly value behavioral rounds but they don’t have a standardized way to assess candidates in those interviews

Because Apple doesn’t standardize their interviews, they’re particularly prone to bias. Sometimes the top down guidance to Apple interviewers is something like: “In the behavioral round, just see if you like them. See if you’d like to get a beer with them.”

Even if rounds aren’t standardized, you will definitely be asked “Why Apple?”, and your answer needs to be on point. Some interviewers reject candidates solely for not having a good answer to this question. “Why Apple?” isn’t always a single question; they can spread this out into multiple questions and drill down on this for a good portion of a behavioral round. You can also expect other motivation-based (or “why”) questions.

Apple wants to hire candidates whose lives have integrated with the Apple products. And the reverse is true too. It's a fatal flaw to say, “I've never used an iPhone or a Macbook or an iPad” because those people clearly haven’t integrated Apple products deeply in their lives.

Apple knows what they like, and they like their products! That doesn’t mean all you have to do is gush about the products to pass the behavioral round. It means you have to tell a genuine story which connects you and Apple products or services. Ideally, a story they will remember.

Another behavioral factor debated among Apple interviewers is whether or not they agree with the idea that Apple is “cult-ish.”

Our theory is that Apple is more likely to reward employees (and candidates) who act like the leader. If you listen to 1:00:36 - 1:02:05 in an interview with Steve Jobs, you’ll see some stark similarities to how Apple interviewers talk about the organization. In this clip, he says, “You know how many committees we have? None. We are organized like a startup.” He then describes the benefits of silos and dividing things up.

Privacy and politics are the natural consequence of a place intentionally designed to be siloed and divided up and kept separate. It’s a cost that Apple accepts because the gain is increased productivity. Put people in closed systems (teams and orgs that don’t talk to other teams and orgs) and watch them get more done. This system works like blinders on a racehorse: it keeps vision focused down the track, on the goal, minimizing peripheral distraction. That’s all they need to see and they run/work faster because of it.

One final aspect of Apple’s behavioral rounds is that they will ask you specific questions about relevant skills. For example, if a team works with big data, they will ask specifically about a time you have worked with large-scale distributed systems in the context of your answer. If you don’t have direct experience with the field, they will try to get as close as possible, like asking you for what tradeoffs you’ve made when choosing a storage system. These behavioral interview questions serve two purposes: showing you have had relevant experience in the context of what the team is hiring for and trying to get you to talk about a particular behavioral skill (e.g., leadership, conflict resolution).

How Apple makes hiring decisions

As evidenced by the highest chaos score, Apple doesn’t do many things in hiring consistently, across the whole company. One trend is that Apple teams rely on post-interview live discussions to make hiring decisions. This varies from somewhat informal (compared to the rest of FAANG) to laughably informal.

Because of the informal decision-making process and reliance on live discussion, managing the impressions of your interviewers is more important at Apple than at other FAANG. In these decision-making meetings, if there’s dissent, they strive for consensus. The people on one side try to convince the other side. This process can last 15-30 minutes on average; all FAANG companies say interviewers fight for candidates, but Apple tends to fight more than most of them.

Because of their patterns of live-discussions and striving for consensus, Apple interviewers are more likely to fight for or against you (if your performance was on the fence) than any other FAANG, except maybe Netflix.

Ultimately, the hiring manager for that particular role has the most say, which means that that’s the person you should be working to impress the most.

Apple coding interview preparation resources

We’ve aggregated a bunch of useful Apple content for you! We have replays of candidates doing mock interviews with Apple interviewers, long-form solutions to common Apple questions, and deep dives into technical topics that tend to come up in Apple interviews.

Apple interview replays

Below are a series of mock interview replays, conducted by Apple interviewers on our platform. Watch them so you can learn from others’ mistakes.

Solutions to common Apple questions

Below are common questions that interviewers from Apple ask on our platform. Since our data comes from mock interviews, questions may not be exactly the same as what you'd see in real interviews.

Technical topics

To figure out what technical topics will come up in your Apple interviews, we did two things. First, we spoke to a bunch of Apple interviewers in our community. Then we cross-referenced all the anecdotes we heard with Glassdoor data AND our own data-set of mock interviews in the style of Apple. Based on all of the above, here are the technical topics you’re likely to encounter:

Other Apple interview preparation resources

For more in-depth information on Apple and their hiring process, or to learn more about Apple’s company culture, be sure to check out the resources listed below. These documents will help you better prepare for software developer and software engineer interviews.

Behavioral

• Khan Academy’s intro to impression management
• his classic interview with Steve Jobs
• If you really want to crush it, read Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson. It’s long, but no other resource will give you such a deep understanding of Apple’s ethos. Once you get it, you can model it in behavioral rounds.

System design

• A system design round with an Apple engineer
• A Senior Engineer's Guide to the System Design Interview
• Spend extra time reading up on reliability
• Study up on the service your team works on (and the tools/software they use) because Apple is more likely to have domain-focused rounds or practical rounds that map closely to what this team does on a day-to-day basis. It’s more important to deeply research the service this team works on and build toy projects or answers about their service.
• Before the technical rounds, ask your recruiter forced-choice questions with two options to determine the focus of the rounds.

Coding

• Before the technical rounds, ask your recruiter forced-choice questions with two options to determine the focus of the rounds.