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Oracle 26NG SDE Full Interview Recap: From Screening to 5 VO Rounds to the HM Call

2026-04-07

Oracle Interview Recap

I recently finished the full Oracle 26NG SDE interview process, from phone screening to five VO rounds and finally the HM call. The clearest takeaway was this:

this was not a process where only the later rounds were serious. Almost every round felt intentionally evaluative.

The screening interviewer was a very friendly Chinese engineer, and the communication experience was smooth. But once the process moved into VO, the tone changed significantly. The technical rounds became much more push-heavy, follow-ups were dense, and the focus shifted clearly toward engineering judgment in realistic work scenarios rather than only algorithm execution.

If your impression of Oracle is still “the problems are manageable,” this process quickly shows that the real differentiator is not raw problem difficulty. It is whether you can explain clearly, reason through tradeoffs, and handle engineering-oriented follow-up well.

Overall Feel of the Process

Structurally, the process was complete:

But what made it intense was not the number of rounds. It was the fact that very few rounds felt like a free pass.

Three patterns stood out:

So this was much closer to “can this candidate operate in a real engineering team” than “can this candidate solve coding exercises.”

Phone Screening: Simplified Redis-like Data Structure

The screening round moved into coding very quickly. After a brief check on language comfort, the interviewer asked for a simplified Redis-like data structure in Go.

Core requirements

The structure needed to support both:

And it needed operations like:

The remove behavior was also detailed:

Expiration was mentioned too, but the interviewer explicitly said it could be deferred as long as the design idea was explained.

What this round really tested

This looked like a data structure problem, but it was really testing abstraction quality.

The main pressure points were:

The interviewer also asked about time complexity and how the system might be optimized for larger scale.

So this round felt much more like:

a mini system design plus coding exercise

If your object model was clear and the code was structured well, the round felt stable. But if you treated it like simple CRUD logic, the follow-ups could become difficult very quickly.

VO Round 1: LRU Cache

The first VO round opened directly with LRU Cache.

The first layer was standard

The obvious solution was:

with the goal of guaranteeing:

At that level, the problem was straightforward.

The real round started after the code

The interviewer was clearly not satisfied with the standard answer alone. Immediately after the implementation, the follow-up shifted to:

At that point it became obvious that the round was not about whether you could code LRU. It was about whether you could turn a familiar problem into an engineering discussion.

If the conversation stops at “hash map plus doubly linked list,” the round feels shallow. If you can extend into:

then the round becomes much stronger.

VO Round 2: Merge Sorted Lists

This round had a very recognizable structure:

What the interviewer was checking

There were really two things under observation:

  1. whether you proactively analyze complexity
  2. whether you know the stronger solution without being dragged toward it

If you only finish the sequential merging version and stop there, the round is acceptable but not especially strong.

If you proactively point out:

then your reasoning appears much more mature.

What made this round interesting

It was not the most stressful round, but it was a very clean fundamentals check.

This is exactly the kind of problem that:

may not cause a direct rejection, but can clearly separate strong candidates from average ones.

VO Round 3: Delete Target Leaf Nodes from Binary Tree

The third round was a classic recursion-based tree problem: delete all leaf nodes whose value equals target.

But the real difficulty was the cascading effect:

once one leaf is deleted, its parent may become a new leaf, and that parent must be checked again.

What this round really tested

This was fundamentally a recursion-design problem.

The clean solution depends on recognizing:

If you treat it as a generic DFS problem, the implementation can become messy very quickly. The cleaner version usually uses the return value of recursion to tell the parent:

Oracle cared a lot about readability here

This round made it especially clear that Oracle pays attention to production-style code.

The interviewer looked closely at:

So this was not just about getting accepted logic. It was about whether the code looked maintainable.

VO Round 4: Project Deep Dive + Hospital Appointment Booking API

This was one of the most representative rounds in the whole process.

First half: project deep dive

The resume discussion here was not shallow at all.

The interviewer kept digging into:

A lot of candidates do not fail coding rounds. They fail here.

The reason is simple:

they are not actually ready to explain the reasoning behind their own project decisions.

Once tradeoff questions become fuzzy, the round becomes dangerous.

Second half: Hospital Appointment Booking API

The technical problem was to design a Hospital Appointment Booking API.

The setup was roughly:

What this problem really was

This was not really an algorithm problem. It was a lightweight system design problem.

The key questions were:

As soon as you started talking about:

the interviewer became much more engaged.

This round very clearly prioritized engineering thinking over algorithm tricks.

VO Round 5: Hiring Manager Call

The final round was an HM behavior round, with no algorithms. But this is definitely not the place to relax.

Because even though it is not technical in the narrow sense, it is still a strong evaluation of whether you feel like a reliable teammate.

Main directions of questioning

The interviewer focused mainly on:

Why STAR alone is not enough here

Many candidates assume the HM round is just a matter of memorizing a few polished behavioral stories. But this round felt much more like an evaluation of decision-making style.

The interviewer really wanted to know:

So the key is not storytelling polish. It is whether your thinking pattern sounds reliable and grounded.

What Oracle’s Style Felt Like Across the Whole Process

When the full loop is viewed as one system, Oracle’s style feels remarkably consistent:

In other words, Oracle does not mainly filter people with obscure problems. It filters through:

That is why the strongest impression from the process is:

the problems were not always the hardest, but almost every round was serious.

Final Takeaway

The most important thing to remember from this Oracle 26NG SDE process is not one individual question. It is the overall direction of evaluation:

If you are preparing for Oracle now, the most valuable preparation is not just solving more problems. It is practicing the engineering follow-up and project tradeoff explanation that come after the first answer.

In many cases, the deciding factor is not the first solution. It is whether you can stay strong through the second and third layer of questioning.

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