Upstart Software Engineer Interview Experience — Six OA Questions Buried in Walls of Text

Upstart·Software Engineer·Jul 2026
Online Assessmenteasy

Very easy, 6 questions. The biggest challenge was that most of the questions were way too long — it took more than 2 minutes just to read and understand each one, and if you didn't pass on the first try, debugging got really stressful.

For example, the first question (8 minute time limit) opened with a long paragraph about someone in medieval times who wrote a manuscript... two minutes later... turns out you just need to take 3 equal-length strings, like abc, def, ghi, and interleave them into adgbehcfi.

Given a list of (x, y) coordinates, output min x, min y, (max x - min x), (max y - min y).

Dedupe a list of integers, e.g. 3, 5, 5, 7, 8, 8, 9 -> output 3, 5, 7, 8, 9.

Another long paragraph about preparing food (and yeah, another 8-minute time limit) — you're given a list of ingredient strings, like 100 g flour, 50 g water, 10 g sugar, and now there are 8 people. Output how much of each ingredient you need: 800 g flour, 400 g water, 80 g sugar.

Transform a sentence like "Hello. Nice to meet you!!" into "Hello! Nice to meet you!!!" (first add 1 to the number of "!", then convert "." to "!").

Given a value and an array of numbers (even length), plus four 0/1 flags as input. The first flag: output 1 if the value appears at an even index in the array, else 0. The second: whether it appears at an odd index. The third: whether it appears in the first half. The fourth: whether it appears in the second half.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

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

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