Status: 2.5 years experience
Position: SWE 2
Location: Bay Area
Date: Jan 2021
I had a recruiter reach out to me on LinkedIn, and after a conversation immediately set me up for a technical phone interview.
Technical phone screen (1 hour):
Interview was conducted by an engineer at Robinhood. The question was related to buying/selling stock. I spent over 5 minutes just trying to understand the problem requirements as it was a bit complex to understand, especially if you're not really familiar with how the stock market works. I was able to get the vast majority of test cases working, I ran out of time due to not being able to import in the IDE and having to refactor code. I still passed and went forward to the next round.
2nd technical phone screen (1 hr):
This phone screen was system design focused. The engineer gave me a prompt and I screen shared a Google Draw window and diagrammed out a solution. This included DB design (tables/attributes), system diagram, as well as talking about limitations and improvements.
Onsite (3 rounds):
The onsite consisted of 3 interviews (project focused, coding, algo design).
Project focused - I was asked to prepare a simple system diagram of a project I had worked on and discuss it with an engineer. This interview turned out to be less in-depth than I thought, we didn't dive deeply technical.
Coding- This was a classic shared-IDE type of interview. They highly stressed getting a working solution before optimizing. The question was once again related to buying/selling stocks. I provided a very not-optimal solution, got everything working, and since we had some extra time I went back and improved the code (extracting duplicate code into a new method, fixing names, etc.)
Algo Design - This interview was really weird and not something I have encountered before. They basically gave me an algorithm question, but did not want me to code a solution. Instead they had a shared white boarding tool to talk through a solution a "design an algorithm". I really didn't understand the expectations but tried my best. Communication with the interviewer was quite difficult so felt very lost. One call out- they expect a big O time analysis on your solution, so be prepared on that front.
Result: I recieved an offer ~5 days later, but went with a different company.