Pinterest Senior Staff Software Engineer (Backend Infra) Interview Experience — Rejected After a Vague K8s Scheduling Tech Depth Round

Pinterest·Software Engineer·Feb 2026
Technical ScreenHR ScreenOtherSenior+Rejectedhard

Backend Infra

The recruiter reached out to me. We chatted about my background, the company culture, that kind of thing. Remote work is allowed, the team does team-building events, and important meetings require you to be onsite.

The second round was a chat with the hiring manager, mostly behavioral: am I currently employed, why do I want to leave. Then we went over my background, what I've done over the last 10 years, what I've done in the last few years. Then we talked about what challenges the company has, etc. Honestly the stuff is pretty much the same as what I'm doing now, so it was a really good match.

Then almost 2 weeks went by with no news. Then out of nowhere they said they wanted to do a Tech depth interview. I looked him up, and he seemed to be the head of the org. I prepared for it seriously.

The first 15 minutes were mutual introductions, and that part went fine. After that it was mainly about K8s scheduling and my day-to-day work, so no surprises there. Then he gave me a problem: there are four applications that all request scheduling at the same time, and I was supposed to ask the right questions. I tried to dig in from every angle, but this guy just wasn't satisfied, and he gave no guidance whatsoever. When I asked about constraints, he was noncommittal about that too. All in all it was kind of baffling. I even tried to steer it toward one of their technical problems that the hiring manager had mentioned before, and he flat out denied it. It didn't feel great.

In the last 5 minutes he let me ask questions, so I asked what challenges they're facing now, etc. One of the problems he brought up happened to be something I have related experience with: you can feed information from the node back to the scheduler, build a plug-in to optimize it, and so on. We talked about that for another 20-plus minutes. He was pretty happy with that part.

Got the rejection two days later.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Pinterest
Role
Software Engineer
Level
Senior+
Rounds
HR Screen → Other → Technical Screen
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
hard
Interview date
Feb 2026
Questions from this interview
2 questions

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