I got rejected after the full Waymo loop. Posting this so the people after me can avoid the same landmine.
Before the interview I looked through the forum and there seemed to be hardly any Waymo reports. After finishing, I do feel there is no fixed question bank, it all depends on what the interviewer feels like asking that day.
The phone screen was a variant of the number-of-islands problem, and I also had to compute the boundary with the water. That round was fairly normal, and I passed.
The virtual onsite was four rounds: two coding, one system design, one BQ.
Coding 1: two perception systems each track objects, and each has its own id. You are given links between the ids on the two sides, plus observations, and in the end you return the histories of the two systems merged and sorted by time, looked up by an id from either side. The problem is not hard, but it was given verbally, and just clarifying the link relationship took almost fifteen minutes. After writing it I had no time to test a few cases.
Coding 2: the interviewer made up his own graph search problem, drew a diagram while explaining it, and the logic went around in circles. I was still not sure by the end whether I had understood it correctly.
The system design was to design a system for a fleet of vehicles to collect map data. The interviewer clearly worked on exactly this, and everything he asked was about their internal scenarios. Someone like me who has never touched anything car-related basically just piled the standard SD playbook on top, and he had no real reaction after listening.
BQ was conflict, feedback, and whether I had any on-call experience. Standard.
A week later I got the automated rejection email, without a single line of feedback. I ground problems for more than a month and it was basically all wasted. If I had known, I would have read up on autonomous-driving stuff before the SD round, otherwise I was completely blind.
Discussion
Loading comments…