Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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13 stories

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PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Full Loop, Rejected on the Newly Added AI Coding Round

Phone screen: LeetCode 1055 It was split into two parts. Part 1 only checks whether the target can be formed at all; once that ran and passed, I did the second part. For Part 2 I first tried recursion + greedy, but it had a bug and couldn't guarantee the optimal solution. After fixing that I wrote a recursive version that passed. But the interviewer wanted an iterative approach, so the rest was t…

RejectedOnsite0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Pin-Board BFS Phone Screen, All Tests Passed, Still Rejected

This is a question other people have already posted. The input is three parameters. The first one is the pins that belong to each topic board. For example, a travel board has pins for maple leaves, ocean waves, and a lake, and a home board has pins for a bedroom, a living room, and renovation. So one topic covers an array of pins. The second parameter is the starting pin, and the third parameter…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Three Parts Passed Before Time Ran Out

The phone screen used the familiar Pins Violation Log problem. The input was a list of violation logs already sorted by timestamp. Each record had the form [postId, policy, timestamp]. There were five parts: Count unique posts by policy. Get the policies violated by a post. Count unique posts at a timestamp. Count unique posts in a time range. Count violations by policy in a time range. I had to…

Technical Screen1
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Onsite With Two System Design Rounds and Escalating Follow-ups

Round 1 — Behavioral A standard set of leadership questions, one by one: Self-introduction Pick a project where you had the strongest ownership, or learned the most from, and go deep on it How did you measure success for this project? What's the strongest team environment you've been part of? A time you had to make a fast decision and live with the consequences A time you got constructive feedbac…

Onsite1
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

The Classic Elevator Question, Two System Design Rounds, and On to Team Matching

Phone: Classic elevator question. Q1: Given n elevators, all starting on floor 1. Then there's a sequence of calls; return which elevator the last call ends up assigned to. You can assume each call finishes before the next one starts. Follow-up: Given elevators with random starting positions, again a sequence of calls; return which elevator the last call is assigned to. This time, when each call…

In progressOnsite0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Phone Screen Plus a Pin Score Tracker Onsite Round

Phone Screen: problem similar to leetcode 815. Virtual onsite Interview 1 (DS): Imagine each Pin on Pinterest has a "trending score" associated with it. You're asked to build a feature which keeps track of all the Pins a user has seen in the last week and at any given time shows the top trending Pin that has been viewed by this user. (ie. Of all the Pins user123 has viewed in the last 24 hours, l…

Onsite0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Pinterest Software Engineer interview experience

The technical screen was difficult in a specific way: it was a LeetCode medium-to-hard problem with about an hour to solve it. I could receive hints, but was still expected to reach the solution myself instead of relying on help. Even with collaboration allowed, the clock mattered heavily. I did not progress to an offer, and the high bar left the familiar feeling that being almost there was not e…

Technical Screen0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Pinterest Software Engineer interview: interrupted virtual technical questions

The interviewer sent the wrong virtual-meeting link and arrived about five minutes late, which set the tone. During a warmup that was basically a Boyer-Moore Voting Algorithm variation, they kept interrupting as I tried a brute-force implementation to understand the problem. I could not finish my thought. That happened again on a graph-traversal question. The interviewer seemed disengaged from th…

0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Reported Jun 2026

Pinterest Software Engineer interview: route reconstruction and Sparse Matrix

I expected Pinterest to be intense, but the technical interview was surprisingly light. There were only two coding questions, and both were straightforward enough that I felt a little underwhelmed afterward. One asked me to reconstruct routes from unordered travel tickets. The other was to implement a Sparse Matrix class. I had prepared with PracHub case studies, which gave me a useful structure…

Offer0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
May 2026

An Elevator Problem With a Follow-up That Was Basically a Second Question

Two weeks ago I did the phone screen for Pinterest, and I still haven't heard anything, so let me post the question while I wait. The recruiter told me beforehand that this round would just be one coding question, and at the time I felt pretty relaxed — I figured forty-five minutes for one problem would be plenty either way. Turns out I was being naive. The question was this: given a set of eleva…

No responseTechnical Screen0
PinterestSoftware EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Rejected After a Vague K8s Scheduling Tech Depth Round

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 o…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
PinterestSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jan 2026

A Debt-Settlement Variant of LC 465

Position: SR. Software Engineer A one-hour phone screen, and the question was a variant of LC 465 — it felt like it needed the accounting concept of settling balances, and if you hadn't seen something like this before you probably couldn't have gotten it. The problem was roughly this: a group of friends goes on a trip, and you're given a list of transactions. Each one has a payer, an amount, and…

Technical Screen0
PinterestSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Three Coding Rounds, One Rough System Design

Overall it wasn't too hard — three coding rounds, one system design round, and one BQ round — but the system design round was really brutal... Here are the details: Coding: I'd never seen this one before. They give you a pre-written class that has a next() function — each call returns a string, roughly like this: "one//ntw", "o//n", "three//nfour", "//nfi", "ve" You're supposed to write your own…

Onsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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