Lyft Intern Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Rounds, Rejected for No Headcount After Three Months

The OA had two parts. The first was responding to a PM's comments inside a doc, and the second was coding — more like they hand you a stripped-down existing project and have you edit the code according to review comments, not your typical LeetCode problem.

VO1: one hour of coding, something like LRU. I basically finished within 30 minutes. The interviewer was really nice, and there weren't many follow-ups.

VO2: 90 minutes of coding. It was probably a Lyft-original problem — I'd never seen it on LeetCode. The prompt was long and took a while to read through. I got stuck for 3-5 minutes debugging, but I got it working in the end. There were two interviewers. No follow-ups, and when I got stuck they did their best to give me hints and told me not to worry too much about the outcome.

After that round I waited two weeks, and HR asked me to do another one.

VO3: 90 minutes of coding, a KV store problem. I finished it in about an hour. The interviewer followed up by asking me to try a different approach, and I got that one working too. The interviewer seemed very satisfied, asked what position I was interviewing for, and once they found out I was an intern candidate said they'd leave me great feedback.

After that I waited another two weeks, and HR said there was no headcount left and rejected me outright. Ha.

Honestly, the whole process was ridiculously dragged out — from the OA to the rejection it took a full three months. I have no idea who let the headcount disappear somewhere along the way.