Pinterest interview questions

Showing 31–60 of 161 results

• Design Algorithm to Minimize Payments in Expense-Sharing AppMedium

  This question evaluates algorithm design and optimization skills, focusing on modeling multi-party transactions and minimizing the number of settlement operations.

  PinterestData ScientistCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design Blackjack Hands, Splits, and a Multi-Deck ShoeMedium

  This problem tests object-oriented design principles, specifically the ability to model a card game with multiple decks, complex state transitions (like splitting), and encapsulation of game rules.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Design Bulk CSV and Individual Record Updates with Reliable, Partitioned ProcessingHard

  A system design question about letting customers update records individually and in bulk by uploading CSV files. It focuses on reliable asynchronous job processing, idempotent row application, partitioning large files and the underlying data, conflicts between the two write paths, and reporting row outcomes.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Comment Notifications with Viral-Pin AggregationHard

  Tests end-to-end system design for large-scale, bursty notification pipelines, focusing on stream processing, aggregation under viral traffic spikes, and reliable third-party push delivery.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Data Structure for Sparse Matrices OperationsMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design efficient data structures and implement algorithms for sparse matrix storage and operations, emphasizing space-efficient representations, matrix arithmetic, and computational complexity reasoning.

  PinterestData ScientistCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design Detection Systems for Risk and SafetyMedium

  This question tests the ability to design an end-to-end classification system for detecting harmful content (e.g., spam or toxic images) while balancing precision and recall at scale.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design Hierarchical Permission ChecksMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of hierarchical access control, tree data structures, and permission inheritance, testing competencies in data modeling and algorithmic reasoning.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design Individual and Bulk Merchant Product Updates with Image UploadsHard

  This problem tests the ability to design a distributed system capable of handling high-throughput asynchronous updates, atomic transactional integrity for partial batch failures, and robust image processing pipelines.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design Pin recommendation systemHard

  This question evaluates ability to design a large-scale personalized home feed recommendation system, testing skills in ML system design, recommender algorithms, retrieval and ranking architectures, feature engineering, data pipelines, low-latency serving, evaluation metrics, safety, and privacy.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design Real-Time Search Autocomplete with Top-10 Popularity-Ranked Prefix SuggestionsHard

  Design a distributed search autocomplete system capable of returning the top 10 popularity-ranked queries for any prefix with sub-30ms latency. The problem evaluates your ability to handle massive read throughput, partition heavily skewed prefix workloads, and merge streaming popularity signals with batch historical baselines.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design User and Item Embeddings from Long HistoriesMedium

  Design an end-to-end candidate retrieval system using user and visual-item embeddings capable of processing ultra-long user histories (up to 160,000 interactions) while handling real-time freshness, cold-start items, and privacy constraints.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a Distributed Rate LimiterMedium

  This problem evaluates your ability to design a distributed rate-limiting service that maintains low latency while enforcing consistent request quotas across multiple global nodes.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Design a Distributed Rate-Limiting ServiceMedium

  Design a highly available, ultra-low-latency distributed rate-limiting service supporting multi-tier rules (user, tenant, route, global) across globally distributed edge gateways.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline Assessment
• Design a Google Photos–like serviceHard

  This question evaluates proficiency in designing large-scale distributed media systems, testing competencies in distributed storage and caching, ingest pipelines, CDN-backed delivery, indexing/search, sync/conflict resolution, access control/privacy compliance, and cost/operational planning.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Large-File Upload and Analysis FlowMedium

  Tests the ability to design an end-to-end media ingestion system supporting chunked resumable uploads, asynchronous analysis pipelines, idempotency, and real-time client notifications.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Low-Latency Typeahead ServiceMedium

  This problem tests the ability to design a high-throughput, low-latency search suggestion system that handles real-time updates and ranking at scale.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Merchant Catalog Update Pipeline with Bulk Files and Image ResizingHard

  Tests the ability to architect a scalable, asynchronous catalog ingestion pipeline that balances high-throughput bulk feed processing with low-latency single-item edits while prioritizing price and inventory updates over compute-heavy image processing.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Multi-Channel Notification SystemMedium

  Design an extensible, resilient multi-channel notification engine (push, email, SMS, in-app) supporting high throughput, deduplication, quiet hours, rate limiting, and provider fallbacks.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnline Assessment
• Design a Typeahead Service on an In-Memory Trie, Then Scale It Without New ServicesHard

  Design a typeahead autocomplete service that starts at a modest scale using an in-memory keyword trie, then scale it out without adding external services. It tests trie internals and keyword storage, read and write paths, score updates, rebuilds with hot swaps, and sharding strategy trade-offs.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a Typeahead Suggestion SystemEasy

  Design a low-latency, real-time typeahead suggestion system that handles prefix search, query ranking, aggressive caching, and stale response mitigation.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a high-throughput distributed rate limiterHard

  Pinterest software-engineer onsite system-design question: design a multi-region, high-throughput distributed rate limiter targeting ~10M req/s with per-user, per-API, and global limits, burst tolerance, and an approximately-sliding window. It tests token-bucket/GCRA algorithm choice, an architecture of local in-process buckets fed by epoch-based token leases, consistent-hashing sharding with hot-key splitting, bounded-overshoot consistency, fault handling, fairness, capacity-planning math (including a 2× spike), backpressure, and observability.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design a real-time home feed rankerHard

  This problem evaluates your ability to design a multi-stage recommendation architecture capable of integrating real-time user signals, managing feature latency, and balancing ranking accuracy with system throughput.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design a violation log analyzerMedium

  This question evaluates proficiency in data structures, in-memory indexing and query design, algorithmic time/space complexity analysis, and reasoning about state management for dynamic event streams.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Design adjustable ID allocatorMedium

  A Pinterest software-engineer onsite coding problem: design an adjustable ID allocator over a fixed [0, 999] ID space with named, contiguous, non-overlapping bucket ranges. It covers initial allocation (packing from desired sizes and validating/normalizing proposed ranges), a resize operation that grows or shrinks a bucket by consuming adjacent free space and then minimally shifting or borrowing from neighbors under a deterministic policy, plus complexity analysis, boundary-case testing, and concurrency handling.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Design an Ad Click Aggregator for Last-Year Counts Using an Existing Logging APIHard

  A system design question about an ad click aggregator whose queries cover the last year rather than the last few minutes and which must take its click data from an existing logging API. It tests requirement clarification, checkpointed ingestion and backfill, deduplication, rollup storage, and correcting historical counts.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an ads event reporting systemMedium

  This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant system for tracking ad interaction events, focusing on scalability, exactly-once processing, and analytical query performance.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignOnsite
• Design an ads system to improve CTRHard

  This question evaluates machine learning system design competency for improving ad click-through rate, testing understanding of metrics, end-to-end architecture, training data and embeddings, and operational issues like cold start, bias and delayed feedback within advertising and recommender domains.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignTechnical Screen
• Design an unsafe content detection systemHard

  This problem evaluates your ability to design a scalable, multimodal machine learning pipeline for detecting policy-violating content on a large-scale visual discovery platform.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Design and Evaluate a Home CarouselMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's expertise in product analytics, experimentation design, metric definition, and instrumentation for measuring the impact of a new UI feature.

  PinterestData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationTechnical Screen
• Design and Interpret a Video Pin ExperimentHard

  This question tests the ability to design a balanced A/B experiment for a two-sided marketplace (creators and viewers) and synthesize conflicting metrics into a launch decision.

  PinterestData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationTechnical Screen