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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Pinterest
Pinterest Software Engineer Interview Experience — Onsite With Two System Design Rounds and Escalating Follow-ups
Round 1 — Behavioral A standard set of leadership questions, one by one: Self-introduction Pick a project where you had the strongest ownership, or learned the most from, and go deep on it How did you measure success for this project? What's the strongest team environment you've been part of? A time you had to make a fast decision and live with the consequences A time you got constructive feedbac…
Interview experiences · Pinterest
Pinterest Software Engineer Interview Experience — Pin-Board BFS Phone Screen, All Tests Passed, Still Rejected
This is a question other people have already posted. The input is three parameters. The first one is the pins that belong to each topic board. For example, a travel board has pins for maple leaves, ocean waves, and a lake, and a home board has pins for a bedroom, a living room, and renovation. So one topic covers an array of pins. The second parameter is the starting pin, and the third parameter…
Interview experiences · Pinterest
Pinterest Software Engineer Interview Experience — The Classic Elevator Question, Two System Design Rounds, and On to Team Matching
Phone: Classic elevator question. Q1: Given n elevators, all starting on floor 1. Then there's a sequence of calls; return which elevator the last call ends up assigned to. You can assume each call finishes before the next one starts. Follow-up: Given elevators with random starting positions, again a sequence of calls; return which elevator the last call is assigned to. This time, when each call…
Interview experiences · Pinterest
Pinterest Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Coding Rounds, One Rough System Design
Overall it wasn't too hard — three coding rounds, one system design round, and one BQ round — but the system design round was really brutal... Here are the details: Coding: I'd never seen this one before. They give you a pre-written class that has a next() function — each call returns a string, roughly like this: "one//ntw", "o//n", "three//nfour", "//nfi", "ve" You're supposed to write your own…
Interview experiences · Pinterest
Pinterest Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Parts Passed Before Time Ran Out
The phone screen used the familiar Pins Violation Log problem. The input was a list of violation logs already sorted by timestamp. Each record had the form [postId, policy, timestamp]. There were five parts: Count unique posts by policy. Get the policies violated by a post. Count unique posts at a timestamp. Count unique posts in a time range. Count violations by policy in a time range. I had to…
Interview experiences · Pinterest
Pinterest Software Engineer interview: interrupted virtual technical questions
The interviewer sent the wrong virtual-meeting link and arrived about five minutes late, which set the tone. During a warmup that was basically a Boyer-Moore Voting Algorithm variation, they kept interrupting as I tried a brute-force implementation to understand the problem. I could not finish my thought. That happened again on a graph-traversal question. The interviewer seemed disengaged from th…
Interview experiences · Pinterest
Pinterest Software Engineer interview: route reconstruction and Sparse Matrix
I expected Pinterest to be intense, but the technical interview was surprisingly light. There were only two coding questions, and both were straightforward enough that I felt a little underwhelmed afterward. One asked me to reconstruct routes from unordered travel tickets. The other was to implement a Sparse Matrix class.
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Account Executive interview: behavioral phone screen and Zoom meeting
My process started with a behavioral interview over the phone, followed by a formal Zoom meeting. The sequence felt structured from the beginning. I didn't run into any major problems during the conversations, but I didn't make it to the final round. The experience ended sooner than I had hoped, and I was disappointed that the last stage never happened for me. I didn't get an offer, though I appr…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Account Executive interview ending with a panel interview
The early steps were remote, and the process eventually became a mix of Zoom and in-person conversations. It moved through multiple stages, ending with a panel interview. The atmosphere was smooth across the rounds. Everyone I met was polite and professional, and the staff communicated clearly about what came next. I never felt blindsided by the logistics or the structure, which made it easier to…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Customer Success Engineer interview with an email technical assessment
I interviewed about two weeks before I heard back, and the process felt pretty lightweight. I started with a technical assessment over email, followed by an interview with the hiring manager. What stood out was how the hiring manager handled the conversation. It didn’t feel much like a discussion. It felt more like I was expected to work through a list of questions while they answered whatever I…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Customer Success Engineer interview with Quickstart homework and technical questions
I went through two stages. The first consisted of take-home exercises. I had to run Plaid’s Quickstart setup and write response emails to mock customers dealing with specific problems. I liked this part because it made me research what was happening and think through how to communicate in a calm, supportive way. The second stage was a one-on-one call. I was told it would be a short conversation w…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Customer Success Engineer take-home with client-style scenarios
My process started with a take-home technical assessment. It wasn’t a complex coding task. Instead, it involved real-life, client-style scenarios where I had to respond to technical issues the way a customer support engineer would. After I submitted it, there was essentially no communication. I received no feedback, had no recruiter contact, and had no real interaction during the process. The onl…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer interview: CodeSignal OA and two technical rounds
My process started with an OA on CodeSignal, which was straightforward enough to complete. After that, I had a technical interview and a final round with a very specific rhythm: two technical interviews back to back, followed by one behavioral segment. The whole experience felt positive. The interviewers were genuinely friendly and engaged with my answers. They seemed interested in understanding…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer Interview Experience — A New Rule-Chain Validation Question in the Screen
Unfortunately I ran into a question that wasn't posted here before. This was a few weeks ago, and the interviewer was a woman. Question: Chain Validation The system has a set of validation rules. Each rule has two fields: [rule name, result] The result can be one of three things: "pass" — the rule passes "fail" — the rule fails the name of another rule — meaning the final result of the current ru…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer Interview Experience — Coding Round with a 3-Milestone Pipeline Problem
There were two rounds total: the first was coding, and the second was a project deep-dive where I had to put together my own PPT slides presenting a project. Plaid coding interview experience. The question was about an automation pipeline, with 3 milestones that added conditions progressively. Milestone 1: single worker — calculate how many jobs get completed within the time limit. The pipeline i…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer Interview Experience — Positive Feedback, Rejected for Background Mismatch
All the interviewers seemed pretty nice, but my impression was that they weren't that technically strong — didn't come across as too sharp. Phone screen: a coupon question and a new question I don't remember too well. They gave you a JSON mapping a bunch of routing numbers to bank names and had you process it — I forget exactly what the task was, but basically you just used various hashmaps to ch…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two-Hour Screen Ends on a Syntax Error
I saw online that the first round is usually one hour, but I applied for a backend role and they required two hours back to back, with a 15-30 minute break in the middle. The first hour's question was a common pipeline question from the forum, and it went smoothly. After I finished, the interviewer was very insistent about how to test it, including wanting asserts in Python rather than print stat…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer interview focused on algorithmic design
My interviews focused mostly on general problem solving, with algorithmic design questions instead of classic LeetCode-style problems. The bar itself wasn't clearly communicated, and the process didn't feel very professional. I also dealt with untimely responses and a sense that nothing was being evaluated consistently as the interviews progressed. By the time the process ended, it felt more like…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer interview: three rounds with a three-hour final
I moved through a tight three-round sequence: an OA, an HR chat, and a final round. The timeline felt fast, and the recruiter was professional. The OA was split into two parts under one larger question, with difficulty around the medium LeetCode level. The final round lasted three hours, divided into 1.5 hours of technical work and 1.5 hours of conversation with a manager. The technical portion i…
Interview experiences · Plaid
Plaid Software Engineer interview with an opaque new-grad-style loop
I went through a new-grad-style loop that felt oddly opaque. It started with an OA, followed by a phone screen and then a voice interview. The bar was hard to read because I wasn't getting consistent signals about what would count. During the phone step, the code I submitted wasn't even fully functional, yet I still moved forward. By the voice interview, my code and explanations felt solid. I did…
Interview experiences · Plangrid
Plangrid Account Executive interview: next-day executive pitch
The process quickly became presentation-heavy. I met with my line manager for about an hour, then was asked to prepare a pitch presentation for a top executive the next day. The request was clear, but the short notice and the way it was handled felt extremely unprofessional. The contrast stayed with me: substantial work was required quickly, then about three months passed before I finally receive…
Interview experiences · Plangrid
Plangrid Account Executive interview: strong early rounds and no follow-up
The beginning of my process was genuinely positive. People were friendly and professional, and I found the conversations engaging as I went through several rounds. I eventually gave a presentation and had a final skip-level interview with senior leadership. At that point, I felt good about how everything had gone. After that last round, the communication stopped. I waited without a clear update,…
Interview experiences · Plangrid
Plangrid Full Stack Engineer five-round interview experience
My process moved quickly through five rounds: a short HR screen, a hiring-manager interview, back-to-back technical interviews covering backend and frontend, and a cultural-fit round. The pace made me switch constantly between behavioral prompts and technical questions. I struggled in the technical rounds and did not clear that part. I heard the result after about two weeks. The sequence did not…
Interview experiences · Plangrid
Plangrid QA Automation Engineer interview: practical QA panel
After a recruiter call, I spoke with the hiring manager and then went to a technical panel with developers, QA, and devops. The hiring-manager conversation focused on behavioral questions. I also walked through an app I had tested and explained what they could expect from my approach. The panel was built around practical problem-solving. I got some leet-code style questions, while the group also…