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

The Apple Hiring Process and Common 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

Want to know if you’re ready to interview at Apple? Do anonymous mock interviews with real Apple interviewers, and see exactly where you stack up.

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.

Anecdote from an Apple Interviewer

“I interviewed with like 12 teams. I got 2 offers. Along the way, I told one of the Apple recruiter’s I was interviewing for another Apple team and they shrugged it off; they didn’t care.”

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.

Step 1: Recruiter call

Please see the section above called “A note about recruiter calls” for what to expect.

Tip to get unstuck

“Ask your Apple recruiter forced choice questions with two options, such as, ‘Is this coding round more of a typical LeetCode round, or more of a domain-specific open ended deep dive into a specific technology?’”

Step 2: Technical phone interview

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.

The tooling used in Apple’s technical interview rounds depends on the team you’re interviewing with.

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.

AI usage in Apple interviews

AI usage in Apple interviews is strictly prohibited.

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.

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.

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.

Behavioral

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

How Apple makes hiring decisions

One trend is that Apple teams rely on post-interview live discussions to make hiring decisions. This varies from somewhat informal to laughably informal.

Anecdote from an Apple Interviewer

“Post-onsite feedback for my org was 100% live discussions. At Apple I never had to write feedback. We made the decision on the same day.”

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.

Apple Interviewer
Count islands
General Avenger, an Apple engineer, interviewed Phantom Dragon in Python

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.

MEDIUM
Data Structures and Algorithms

Generate Parentheses

[Given n pairs of parentheses, write a function to generate all combinations of well-formed parentheses.]

HARD
Data Structures and Algorithms

Longest Increasing Path in a Matrix

[Given an m x n integers matrix, return the length of the longest increasing path in the matrix. You may only move up, down, left, or right.]

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.