Whiteboard Confidential

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Technical interview replays and deep-dive commentary, with engineers from the world's best companies: Google, Meta, OpenAI, and many more

Last refreshed: October 14th, 2025 at 11:48 PM ⓘ

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Episodes

Amazon L5 vs L6 Expectation: Behavioral Interview with a Staff-Level Amazon Engineer

REPLAY EPISODE: Our candidate prepares for Amazon’s behavioral leadership principles interview. They practice answers around making high-stakes decisions without full data, handling disagreements with stakeholders, and demonstrating ownership during complex migrations. The interviewer pushes for depth and senior-level framing, highlighting where answers are closer to L5 vs. L6 expectations. The feedback section breaks down how to strengthen STAR responses, as well as how to provide scope and com...

Oct 09, 2025•1 hr 3 min

Seat Allocation at Scale: Coding Interview with a Google Engineer (Python)

A candidate with 1.5 years of experience undertakes their first system design mock interview, tasked with creating a highly scalable seat allocation algorithm for a cinema. The problem involves calculating available 4-person groups considering aisle breaks and adjacency. The discussion covers initial brute-force, crucial optimizations for sparse data, handling edge cases, and evolving the code for production, followed by detailed feedback on performance and areas for improvement.

Oct 01, 2025•1 hr 12 min

Payment Pipeline Design at Netflix Scale: System Design Interview with a Netflix Engineer

REPLAY EPISODE: A candidate takes on their very first system design mock interview. The problem: designing a pipeline that connects rights management, financial accounting, and payments at Netflix scale. They need to figure out how to combine movie rights data with royalty fees and ensure accurate payouts downstream. The interviewer, a seasoned Netflix engineer who has led dozens of design interviews, pushes the candidate to think through trade-offs like consistency vs. availability, synchronous...

Sep 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min

Design a Calendar for 100 Million Users: Senior/Staff System Design Interview with an Amazon Engineer

REPLAY EPISODE: In this system design mock interview, the candidate is asked to design the event management component of a large-scale calendar system — including functionality for creating events, sending invitations, and sending notifications before meetings. With 12 years of experience, the candidate targets L5–L6 roles at top tech companies like Amazon and Meta. The interviewer, a seasoned SDE3 at Amazon, pushes the candidate on functional requirements, database design, and operational scala...

Sep 17, 2025•1 hr 2 min

Whiteboard Confidential Trailer

Whiteboard Confidential brings you unfiltered interview replays with engineers from top companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Raw problem-solving and candid feedback straight from the hiring seat. Once a month, Spotlight episodes feature engineers who’ve survived the interview gauntlet as they share lessons learned and even react to their own mock interviews. Subscribe now so you never miss an episode!

Sep 16, 2025•1 min

From 500+ Rejections to Senior MLE at Meta with Shawn Strausser

SPOTLIGHT EPISODE: What happens when a physics PhD and former pro poker player decides to break into big tech? Drew sits down with Shawn Strausser to break down how he went from burnout to hired by Meta as a Senior MLE. You’ll hear the full story, from his initial struggles applying to 500+ jobs with no interviews, to the moment a spam-folder recruiting email from Meta changed everything. Along the way, we pause to reflect on Shawn’s live mock ML system design interview, highlighting key moments...

Sep 09, 2025•51 min

Solve Binary Tree Challenges Under Pressure: Coding Interview with a Meta Engineer

REPLAY EPISODE: Our candidate is preparing for an upcoming Meta phone screen and takes on two tree-based problems under timed conditions. The first question involves finding the minimum depth of a binary tree, which the candidate solves confidently with both DFS and BFS approaches. The second, more challenging follow-up asks for the smallest subtree containing all the deepest nodes (a classic lowest common ancestor problem with a twist). Throughout the interview, the candidate demonstrates clear...

Sep 02, 2025•1 hr 3 min

Build a Photo Sharing App for Up to 1 Billion Users: System Design Interview with a FAANG Engineer

REPLAY EPISODE: Curious how to approach large-scale design interviews? This is the level of depth, structure, and clarity that top companies like Stripe and Meta are actively looking for. In this mock system design interview, a senior engineer is asked to design a photo-sharing app (something like Instagram, but from scratch and at massive scale). What follows is a masterclass in thoughtful architecture: from exploring nuanced functional and nonfunctional requirements to tackling schema design, ...

Aug 19, 2025•1 hr 1 min

Detect Fraud & Scam Content: E6 Interview with a Meta Engineer

REPLAY EPISODE: In this episode of Whiteboard Confidential, an aspiring ML engineer with no formal industry experience impresses a Meta interviewer by tackling a complex system design question: how would you detect fraudulent or scam content on Facebook? Despite never having held an ML job, the candidate delivers a calm, clear, and deeply thoughtful design that rivals what you’d expect from an IC5–IC6 engineer. From feature pipelines and model architecture to deployment strategy and label bias, ...

Aug 12, 2025•1 hr 14 min

What Separates E5 from E6 (Design Instagram Reels Interview with a Meta Engineer)

REPLAY EPISODE: In this episode, we have a real mock interview for a Staff Machine Learning (E6) role at Meta, where the candidate is asked to design the recommendation system behind Instagram Reels. This means choosing which short videos to show to billions of users in real time, based on their behavior and interests. The candidate has a strong grasp of ML fundamentals and proposes modern architecture choices like multitask learning and multi-stage ranking. However, they ultimately do not pass ...

Aug 07, 2025•1 hr 14 min

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