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Pinterest Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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24 results
- Splitwise Question in the Tech Screen, Ran Out of Time on the Follow-upPinterest · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026Rejected
Their DE role is titled SDE too, and the interview process is the same as the SDE one. I prepared a dozen or so questions from interview reports, but I didn't prepare this one. I stumbled my way through writing it, and the interviewer gave me a lot of hints. I blame myself for not preparing enough. I just moved on. The Splitwise question, the one listed for Pinterest. It is exactly the same probl…
- Full Loop, Rejected on the Newly Added AI Coding RoundPinterest · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
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…
- Onsite With Two System Design Rounds and Escalating Follow-upsPinterest · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
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…
- Pin-Board BFS Phone Screen, All Tests Passed, Still RejectedPinterest · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
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…
- Three Parts Passed Before Time Ran OutPinterest · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
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…
- Two SQL Questions and Similar Pins in PythonPinterest · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
I'm sharing the questions I encountered in a Pinterest technical interview. I've organized them to give back, and I hope this helps anyone preparing! The descriptions below are reconstructed from memory. I've simplified the field names; these aren't word-for-word copies of the original questions. SQL: The top two categories by engagement rate in each country (I don't quite remember exactly how ma…
- The Classic Elevator Question, Two System Design Rounds, and On to Team MatchingPinterest · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026In progress
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…
- Phone Screen Plus a Pin Score Tracker Onsite RoundPinterest · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2026
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…
- Phone Screen With a Four-Part GET Request and IP Counting Task, Then SilencePinterest · Site Reliability Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Jul 2026No response
I have no SRE experience, but I have 7 years as a cloud SDE and I've always been part of the oncall rotation. I was recently laid off and I'm in a hurry to find a job. Pinterest didn't have a role that fit me especially well, so I just applied to a Senior SRE role to try my luck, and I got a phone screen invitation. The recruiter said the early questions would be similar to LeetCode coding proble…
- Pinterest Account Executive interview: consecutive sales interviewsPinterest · Account Executive · HR Screen · Jul 2026
After the recruiter screen, I had three interviews in a row, with behavioral questions mixed with more technical prompts. There was almost no downtime between conversations, so I had to stay sharp throughout. The middle conversation was with the hiring manager, followed by two peer interviews. One leaned more technical and the other more toward behavioral fit. The difficulty felt fairly even. It…
- Pinterest Machine Learning Engineer interview: ML theory and quick rejectionPinterest · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026Rejected
The loop was short but rough. In the initial conversation, I tried to explain my projects, but the interviewer did not seem willing to listen. I then had a technical machine-learning session covering core theory, including vanishing gradients and ensemble methods such as bagging and boosting. There was also a LeetCode-style problem for about 30 minutes. The process ended quickly, and I received a…
- Pinterest Software Engineer interview experiencePinterest · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
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…
- Pinterest Software Engineer interview: interrupted virtual technical questionsPinterest · Software Engineer · Jul 2026
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…
- A 30-Slide Case Round in One HourPinterest · Data Scientist · Senior+ · Onsite · Jun 2026
Overall, Pinterest's interviews really emphasize solid technical fundamentals. Stats, case, and coding all felt like final exams — the questions were dense and numerous, and they went really deep and got into a lot of detail. Most important thing is you could tell they had a specific correct answer in mind — even if you got most of the way there but didn't land on the exact right answer, the inte…
- Pinterest Software Engineer interview: route reconstruction and Sparse MatrixPinterest · Software Engineer · Jun 2026Offer
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…
- An Elevator Problem With a Follow-up That Was Basically a Second QuestionPinterest · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · May 2026No response
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…
- 70-Minute CodeSignal OA with Hand-Written Bagging and Naive BayesPinterest · Machine Learning Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Feb 2026
Based in Toronto. Looks like several teams were hiring at the same time, mostly on the search/ads/recommendations side. HR reached out on LinkedIn, and after I submitted my resume and cover letter they sent me an OA. 70 minutes, 10 questions, done on CodeSignal — 6 multiple choice, 1 coding question, and 2 ML engineering questions. The multiple choice questions were mostly ML fundamentals: the de…
- Rejected After a Vague K8s Scheduling Tech Depth RoundPinterest · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Rejected
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…
- A Debt-Settlement Variant of LC 465Pinterest · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
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…
- Five Rounds Interrupted by a Recruiter ConflictPinterest · Data Scientist · Onsite · Jan 2026
I had a really bizarre interview experience. Pinterest VO: it was originally supposed to be 5 rounds back-to-back in one day, but on the day of the interview the recruiter said there was a conflict. I only did three rounds, and the other two got rescheduled to two days later. Round 1: use case / analytical system design. The interviewer was a DS manager. He laid out a simple problem statement and…
- Five-Round Onsite Loop Ends in RejectionPinterest · Data Scientist · Senior+ · Onsite · Oct 2025Rejected
Fresh rejection writeup — I just did a virtual onsite for a Staff Data Scientist role at Pinterest. (1) Coding: SQL joining three tables to calculate, for each country, the category with the most impressions, and to calculate the heavy user rate (heavy user defined as active at least 4 days in the past week, with at least 3 features used on one of those days). There was also a simple Python quest…
- L5 Loop with Five Onsite Rounds and a BQ-Heavy XFNPinterest · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025Offer
Let me start with the overall timeline. I interviewed for a level 5 position: one round of phone screen, five rounds of onsite, and two rounds of team matching. The whole process took about a month, and after that I waited 2-3 days for the offer. Here's the general picture of how it went. Overall the interview had some real difficulty to it. The technical part was SQL plus Python. The SQL was on…
- Three Coding Rounds, One Rough System DesignPinterest · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025
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…
- A Restaurant Reservation Coding Question and a Deep-Dive Stats RoundPinterest · Data Scientist · Onsite · Aug 2025
I felt like the whole interview experience was really good — the interviewers listened carefully, and there wasn't that "gotta beat you down" attitude some interviewers have. Two of the rounds felt somewhat difficult to me. coding: Not counting the resume intro, small talk, and the interviewer showing up late, the actual working time was about 30 minutes. The question involved a nested dictionary…
