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Oracle OCI IC-2 Interview: Phone Screen and Five-Round Virtual Onsite (Seattle, 2020)

OracleMember of Technical Staff (IC-2), OCI·Seattle, WA·Interviewed September 2020Offer

Updated July 17, 2026

A Software Engineer with three years of professional experience interviewed for a Member of Technical Staff (IC-2) position on Oracle's OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) team in Seattle, WA, with an interview date of September 14, 2020. The process consisted of a single one-hour phone interview, and, after passing that stage, a virtual onsite made up of five back-to-back one-hour interviews.

Across the onsite loop, the candidate faced a mix of formats: coding problems paired with networking and project questions, a purely behavioral round with a product manager from outside the team, another coding-plus-project round, a round with four coding problems, and a closing hiring-manager conversation covering resume history, working style, and motivation for joining Oracle. The candidate ultimately received an offer.

How the process went

  1. Phone Interview

    One hour long, mixing two coding problems with Java exception-handling questions.

  2. Virtual Onsite

    Five back-to-back one-hour interviews covering coding, networking fundamentals, project deep dives, a cross-functional behavioral round, and a hiring-manager round.

  3. Outcome

    The candidate received an offer; the original post does not specify how long after the onsite the decision came.

Phone Interview

Coding fundamentals and Java exception handling · 1 hour

  • Remove Duplicates from Sorted List
  • Sort Colors
  • Difference between checked and unchecked exceptions in Java
  • What is IllegalArgumentException?

Virtual Onsite - Round 1

Networking fundamentals, project discussion, and coding · 1 hour

  • Difference between TCP and UDP
  • What is Secure Socket Layer (SSL)?
  • In-depth discussion of the candidate's current project
  • Symmetric Tree

Virtual Onsite - Round 2 (Product Manager)

Behavioral only; interviewer was a product manager not associated with the hiring team · 1 hour

    No technical questions in this round; the original post does not list the specific behavioral questions asked, only that they covered the candidate's performance in previous and current roles.

    Virtual Onsite - Round 3

    Resume project walkthrough and coding · 1 hour

    • Explanation of one project listed on the resume
    • Merge Intervals

    Virtual Onsite - Round 4

    Coding, four problems · 1 hour

    • Number of Islands
    • Find Median from Data Stream
    • Two Sum
    • Two Sum II - Input Array Is Sorted

    Virtual Onsite - Round 5 (Hiring Manager)

    Resume review and behavioral/motivation questions · 1 hour

    • Resume-related questions
    • Roles and responsibilities on the current team
    • What if there is disagreement with the manager?
    • What qualities make a good software engineer?
    • Biggest achievements
    • Why do you want to work for Oracle?
    • Where do you see yourself in five years?
    • What challenges are you looking for in this job?
    • Biggest professional disappointment

    Key takeaways

    • Expect a blend of classic coding problems (Number of Islands, Two Sum variants, Merge Intervals, Symmetric Tree) and CS fundamentals like TCP vs. UDP, SSL, and Java exception types across the loop.
    • Be ready to walk through the same resume project more than once, since multiple rounds asked for a project deep dive.
    • Not every round in the loop is technical; the product-manager round in this loop was entirely behavioral, so treat cross-functional rounds as a conversation about past performance rather than a coding test.
    • Prepare direct, specific answers for standard hiring-manager questions such as 'why this company,' a five-year outlook, and how you'd handle disagreement with a manager, since a full round was built around these.
    • Because the phone screen and each onsite round were capped at one hour with multiple topics inside it, practicing concise explanations under time pressure can help.

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    Source

    The questions and process facts come from the candidate's public write-up, linked below. The retelling above is our own summary.

    Candidate's public write-up on LeetCode Discuss