Oracle OCI SDE I (IC-2) Interview Experience: Seattle, 2020
Updated July 17, 2026
A candidate with about a year of full-time experience as an Amazon Cloud Support Associate got a warm introduction to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) through a university friend who mentioned Oracle was hiring SDEs in Seattle. The friend passed along a LinkedIn contact for the hiring manager, and after the candidate reached out with a resume, the manager set up a phone interview.
The loop that followed was a single phone screen plus five onsite interviews mixing coding, a lighter lunchtime conversation, a compressed system design segment, and a separate behavioral conversation built around OCI's stated values. Topics ranged from a frequency-counting heap problem and a graph BFS distance question to a binary search tree iterator, a phone-number reservation design problem, a short system design prompt on centralized logging, and a hard string problem on finding a duplicated substring.
How the process went
Referral & phone screen
A friend's introduction to the hiring manager on LinkedIn led to a resume submission and a phone interview focused on one coding question.
Onsite - coding rounds
Four separate onsite interviews covered graph search, tree data structures, a randomized-selection design problem, and a hard string problem, with the interviewer generally asking for an initial solution and then a more efficient one.
Onsite - lunch & system design
A lunch conversation with the manager included a short coding exercise, and a later round folded in a roughly 15-minute system design discussion about a centralized logging service.
Behavioral conversation
A separate conversation covered OCI's stated values alongside follow-up questions about the candidate's graduate school projects.
Decision
The hiring manager followed up by the end of the same week with an offer.
Phone Screen
Coding - frequency counting with heaps
- Given a text file containing different types of log messages, return the K most frequently occurring messages.
The candidate first proposed a max-heap holding all N messages, then refined the answer to a min-heap capped at size K, which needs less space than inserting every message.
Onsite Round 1
Coding - graph search / BFS
- In a matrix of 0s and Ds, where D represents a database, find the shortest distance from each 0 to its nearest D.
The first pass was a brute-force scan checking neighbors from every cell, roughly O(n^4); the candidate then moved to a multi-source BFS starting from the D cells, getting it working in the closing minutes of the round.
Onsite Round 2
Coding - trees / iterator design
- Implement an iterator for a binary search tree.
The candidate first stored a full in-order traversal in an array, then discussed the more space-efficient controlled-recursion iterator as the stronger approach.
Onsite Round 3 (Lunch with Manager)
Light coding conversation
- Calculate the angle between the hour and minute hands of a clock at a given time.
The candidate had reviewed a similar clock-angle problem shortly before the interview.
Onsite Round 4
Data structure design & system design
- Design a pool of unreserved phone numbers with a getRandom() method to fetch an available number and a reserve() method to assign one to a customer, with time complexity as the main constraint.
- Design a centralized logging system that collects logs from about 100 servers, optimized for fast log search.
The system design portion was limited to roughly 15 minutes; the candidate structured the answer around general concepts from a public system design reference.
Onsite Round 5
Coding - strings
- Given a string, find the longest repeated, or duplicated, substring.
Described as a hard problem, the candidate reached only a brute-force approach, and the conversation touched on tries and the Rabin-Karp algorithm.
Behavioral / Values Conversation
Behavioral
- Share examples that demonstrate OCI's stated values, described as similar to Amazon's leadership principles.
- Follow-up questions about the candidate's projects from their master's program.
Key takeaways
- A well-placed referral can open a direct line to a hiring manager; a short, relevant note alongside a resume was enough to get a phone screen scheduled.
- Practicing the space-efficient variant of a common pattern, such as a size-capped min-heap instead of a full max-heap, can matter as much as knowing the basic pattern itself.
- When a system design slot is short, having a general framework to structure the answer around matters more than covering every detail.
- Preparing value-alignment stories ahead of time made the behavioral conversation easier to navigate, especially with a bar-raiser-style interviewer asking deeper follow-ups.
- Not every round needs a fully optimized solution: talking through a brute-force approach and the direction toward a better one still landed well in at least one round.
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Practice this interviewSource
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