I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Pinterest (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
Applied through a friend. The recruiters were wonderful in setting up interviews quickly. Their follow ups were also within a day or two. I had two telephonic interviews. First being a very non interactive one the second one was good. First interviewer seemed not interested at all and was mostly working on the project while I was breaking my head over the question. I explained the solution first and then started coding. Interviewer then pointed out that I did not understand the question after I spend 10 minutes solving the problem. I later came to know that the interviewer had expressed an opinion that I did not understand the question. What a bummer. As a person who had taken 1000s of interview I could say that the first one was more prejudiced or completely out of interest. Second interview was very interactive and was working along for most of the interview. I think the first interview completely tipped off the decision.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Round 1 Q1
Given a log file with list of tuples(TIMESTAMP, USER, PAGE_TYPE) where page type being the page visited. Form sequence of pages the user had visited and then find the most common sequence.
The question was later changed to form triplets of sequences. e.g if the sequence is A->B->C->D->E->F, the triplet sequences would be
A B C
B C D
D E F
and then find the most common sequence.
Round 2 Q1
Open ended question.
Given a scenario where you are batch processing and each entry takes more than 30 seconds to process, design a system to process large volume of such data.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Pinterest (Ciudad de Mexico) in Aug 2025
Interview
It was fast and had 3 interviews after screening one.
Basic programming, but data wrangling was harder as the person interviewing had more experience than the previous ones and it showed
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What programming software do you use?
How would you arrange some data for future extraction
Recruiter round - Resume and projects mostly
Phone Screen - Leetcode based medium difficulty problem
Virtual Onsite - in total 5 rounds
Questions were mostly from leetcode. 2 coding, 2 systems design and one Hiring manager round
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design splitwise using object oriented programming
Interviewer barely spoke english. I solved the problem and had a bug. I was able to fix the bug quickly by myself. Then the next day the interviewer passed on my candidacy because my “initial solution had a bug” which I fixed quickly. The most annoying part of the interview was the lack of english-speaking abilities. Dont waste your time. They’ll dock you for any frivolous thing, especially if you’re not from “their” community. Please stop having people who dont speak english interview candidates!
