Lyft Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Onsite Went Fine, Hiring Manager Call Was Discouraging

First, the technical screen. It was a sliding window LeetCode hard, but honestly not that hard — it was just 76, Minimum Window Substring.

Next came the onsite, three rounds total.

The first round was coding. The first 15 minutes were spent talking about past projects, then 60 minutes on the problem, and the last 15 minutes was free-form chat. The problem: given a set of jobs, each with a start time and a duration, assign them to different workers to execute, with the goal of using as few workers as possible. Each worker can only handle one job at a time, so when multiple jobs overlap you need to add another worker. At the end you need to output which worker each job is assigned to. Using a heap for this comes pretty naturally.

The second round was system design. The problem was to design a charity donation website. The payment part was abstracted away behind an SDK, but you still needed to think about failure handling and how to deal with traffic spikes. Overall it was a fairly standard system design round, but the interview used Google Draw for diagramming, which was a pretty bad experience — I'd suggest practicing with that tool beforehand. The interviewer was pretty focused on various failure scenarios, like how to avoid donations getting lost or the amount being wrong.

The third round was behavioral. It was basically a string of "tell me about a time" questions, not built around a single project — you need to have a bunch of different small examples ready, things like conflict, communication, failure, decision-making, and so on. Overall pretty standard, but partway through I got asked some questions about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), like how I support diversity, which caught me a bit off guard at the time.

After passing the onsite, there was still a call with the hiring manager. This round wasn't a great experience, honestly felt a bit sketchy. They mentioned that most of the team had only joined a few months ago, burnout was pretty bad, and the tech stack was pretty basic — nothing particularly interesting. They also told me directly that based on my onsite performance they thought I was on the weaker side. I'd heard before that Lyft's bar isn't that high, but after this round it actually left me feeling kind of discouraged instead.