Overall, Pinterest's interviews really emphasize solid technical fundamentals. Stats, case, and coding all felt like final exams — the questions were dense and numerous, and they went really deep and got into a lot of detail. Most important thing is you could tell they had a specific correct answer in mind — even if you got most of the way there but didn't land on the exact right answer, the interviewer still wouldn't be satisfied.
The good part is the interviewers were all good at guiding you and willing to give hints.
But I don't know if answering something only after getting a hint still counts as passing...
Phone screen: a question straight from the forums here, active users by country.
HM screen: went over my project, plus domain knowledge.
Onsite:
I signed an NDA so I can't get into too much detail.
Stats: they tested the PMF of a distribution, where you had to plug in numbers and compute by hand — how to calculate the p-value, how to calculate sample size, all the way down to the specific formulas. The billboard question was also given with a lot of detail — you had to listen carefully, because the interviewer's description actually had a lot of constraints built in, so you couldn't just treat it as an open-ended case.
Coding: a variant of bootstrap. The interviewer was really nice and gave some hints. I ran out of time at the end, but the code I did write was bug-free... not sure if that's going to sink me on this round.
Case: the whole thing ran on slides. The interviewer opened by saying we don't have enough time and jumped straight in — explaining the choice and use of metrics, explaining what the various charts meant, and the later experiment design also tied back to the earlier data questions. In one hour there were at least 30 slides, and every single slide had a question on it. By the end my brain felt completely fried.
XFN behavioral round: plus they asked whether I had experience with situations where you can't run an A/B test, and how I'd make that tradeoff. My background happened to line up well with this interviewer, so they asked a lot about domain-specific experience and questions.
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