MathWorks Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Seven-Round Superday With a Presentation Deck and No Lunch Break

This year a lot of companies are on a hiring freeze. MathWorks is one of the few still hiring — I landed an offer for the SWE2 role.

I got in through a referral.

Recruiter call: matched with a team in Simulink product cloud infra. Just a simple introduction and some logistics questions.

OA: debugging plus a coding problem. Breezed through it.

Phone screen 1: self-intro plus the classic CS trivia questions — things like static vs. dynamic pointers, the difference between http/https, tcp/udp. This part probably depends on which team you end up matched with.

Phone screen 2: self-intro plus a coding problem plus Q&A.

At this point they told me to schedule a superday, and I had to prepare a presentation slide deck about my past experience and projects — first time I'd seen that format.

Every round was 50 minutes, back-to-back, with only a 10-minute water break in between. No lunch.

Onsite Round 1: Presentation plus defense. They dug deep into the technical details on my resume and how my projects actually progressed. Pure behavioral.

Onsite Round 2: System design — design the login/auth infra for a product. They dug into database choice, schema design, how to back it up, API design, the basic login/auth flow, and how to scale the service 10x.

Onsite Round 3: A coding problem. I was a little thrown the first time I read it, kept confirming the definition with the interviewer, and then had to write my own test cases.

Onsite Round 4: Behavioral — "tell me about a time when you...," "why/why not" type questions. I'd prepped Amazon's leadership principles and breezed through it.

Onsite Round 5: A variant of the earlier coding problem, a DP question. By this point I was already running out of steam, but I forced my way through it with a recursive explanation.

Onsite Round 6: Hiring manager call — congrats, blah blah, talked about expectations, the team's projects, growth prospects, that kind of thing. Basically it meant I was in.

Onsite Round 7: HR call — offer package, perks, logistics. Gee, thanks.

By the end of it all I was completely wiped out. I went and immediately ate a huge pizza to recover. I'll let you all be the judge.