Upstart Software Engineer Interview Experience — Recalling All 5 Online Assessment Questions

Upstart·Software Engineer·Jul 2026
Online Assessmentmedium

All 5 real questions, fully recalled.

Question 1: Sum of multiples of 3, 5, 7 less than a given number

For example, if the given number is 12, the multiples of 3 below it are 3, 6, and 9; the multiples of 5 are 5 and 10; and the multiple of 7 is 7 — so sum = 3 + 6 + 9 + 5 + 10 + 7 = 40 (12 itself, although a multiple of 3, is not included). Note: the original post's formatting here was garbled (stray line breaks around small numerals that read like superscripts), so this worked example is a best-effort reconstruction based on what the problem itself is asking, not a verbatim transcription of the source.

Question 2: Alphabetical Word Count

Given a string/list, sort and output each word along with its count in the list, in alphabetical/lexicographical order.

Question 3: AddDrama

Implement a function AddDrama(String s) that replaces every period "." in the string with an exclamation mark "!", and appends an extra "!" after each group (word/segment).

Question 4: Minimum Absolute Difference

Given an unsorted array of numbers, find the minimum absolute difference between any two numbers in it. For example: [1, 20, 100, 3], the minimum difference is 3 - 1 = 2.

Question 5

I can't quite remember this one. If anyone has taken this OA recently, feel free to add it in the comments!

Personal summary and suggestions

Some of the questions were really easy — one of them I finished and passed in about 2 minutes — but you can't bank that saved time for the harder ones, so when you finish an easy question quickly, go back and double check the test cases.

Speed and mindset: 12 minutes to read, understand, code, and debug is genuinely tight. If you realize your approach is wrong, refactor immediately — you need to move fast.

Hope everyone makes it through to the next round!

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Upstart
Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Online Assessment
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Jul 2026
Questions from this interview
4 questions

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