Lyft Interview Experiences

9 results

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  Messenger Design and a Next-Day PassLyft · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026

  The target level was Senior. The process was bizarre, but I'll leave that aside. Overall, the interviews weren't difficult. Surprisingly, the hardest coding problem was in the phone screen. Phone-screen coding: LeetCode 76. VO 1: The behavioral round. They asked about my past projects, which project I was proudest of, how I had moved projects forward with colleagues over the past two years, and s…

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  Wiki Crawler Design and a Talent Pool RejectionLyft · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026

  Rejected

  The phone screen was the typical one: they give you an API that can fetch pages, and you write a wrapper that calls this external API to implement fetching by word count. Onsite, showtime. The system design was wiki crawling: how do you crawl all of the wiki's content and store it, while keeping it updated within a certain time window, for example no more than five days stale. The coding was the…

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  75-Minute Phone Screen with Train/Test Error Analysis and K-Means from ScratchLyft · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026

  In progress

  75 min. The first part was ML. They gave me 5 sets of training/test error and I had to analyze the possible causes. The cases included training high / test low, training low / test high, both low, and both high. I hadn't prepared for the training high / test low case and got stuck for a bit. The interviewer hinted that the train and test data might have different distributions, or that the traini…

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  Lyft Data Scientist interview: probability to causal modelingLyft · Data Scientist · HR Screen · Jul 2026

  I began with a recruiter screen of about 30 minutes. It was structured: they checked the basic boxes and explained what would happen next. The process then moved through a general data-science screen on probability, A/B testing, and business sense, followed by four deeper technical rounds. Those covered coding and algorithms, optimization, causal modeling, and business acumen tied back to product…

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  Lyft Software Engineer Interview Experience: A transactional recruiter screenLyft · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Jun 2026

  The recruiter screen set a rough tone immediately. I came in for a backend engineering role, but the conversation felt overly transactional, as though boxes were being checked instead of discussing the technical impact I had delivered. I shared concrete examples from past work, including architecture decisions, optimizations, and engineering scenarios. I expected the conversation to connect those…

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  Onsite Loop with a Paginated Fetch Design and a Job SchedulerLyft · Software Engineer · Onsite · May 2026

  Onsite. They gave me a long chunk of existing code and asked me to implement a function based on it. Essentially there's a fetch(page) function that returns the items on that page along with the next page's nextPage. We needed to implement fetch_n as a method on another class, so that we could pull n elements continuously. Each call continues extracting from wherever the last call left off, so th…

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  Onsite Went Fine, Hiring Manager Call Was DiscouragingLyft · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026

  First, the technical screen. It was a sliding window LeetCode hard, but honestly not that hard — it was just 76, Minimum Window Substring. Next came the onsite, three rounds total. The first round was coding. The first 15 minutes were spent talking about past projects, then 60 minutes on the problem, and the last 15 minutes was free-form chat. The problem: given a set of jobs, each with a start t…

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  Surprised by the Low L4 Base Pay, Then a Four-Round OnsiteLyft · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025

  The HR video interview covered salary expectations (the L4 base salary was really low — I was shocked). After passing that round, I had a tech phone screen (pretty similar to what people share online — probability calculations, an open-ended supply-and-demand question). After that round they went straight to scheduling a 4-round onsite. HR was really nice and gave me a rough idea of what each rou…

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  Three Rounds, Rejected for No Headcount After Three MonthsLyft · Software Engineer · Intern · Onsite · Oct 2025

  Rejected

  The OA had two parts. The first was responding to a PM's comments inside a doc, and the second was coding — more like they hand you a stripped-down existing project and have you edit the code according to review comments, not your typical LeetCode problem. VO1: one hour of coding, something like LRU. I basically finished within 30 minutes. The interviewer was really nice, and there weren't many f…