Pinterest interview questions

Showing 121–150 of 161 results

• List All Plus/Times Expressions Reaching a Target Under Operator PrecedenceHard

  Tests backtracking and state tracking with operator precedence to evaluate and enumerate arithmetic expressions using addition and multiplication.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• List Unallocated Experiment BucketsMedium

  Determine all unassigned experiment bucket IDs in the range [0, total_buckets - 1] given lists of control and treatment bucket allocations.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Mark and Compact a Heap-Indexed SubtreeMedium

  This problem tests array manipulation, heap-based tree traversal, and stable partitioning techniques while requiring memory efficiency without modifying the original input.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment
• Maximize Non-Overlapping Task Scheduling EfficiencyMedium

  This question evaluates understanding of interval scheduling and resource optimization, focusing on reasoning about time intervals and conflict-free selection of tasks.

  PinterestData ScientistCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Measure Billboard Campaign Impact: Design, Bias, Test StrategyMedium

  This question assesses your ability to design a quasi-experimental framework for measuring the offline impact of an online brand campaign on user acquisition, accounting for external noise and selection bias.

  PinterestData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationOnsite
• Minimum Transfers Between Pin BoardsMedium

  Tests breadth-first search and graph modeling skills by finding the shortest path across overlapping collections without constructing a dense graph between every pair.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Optimize Hyper-parameter Search to Prevent Combinatorial ExplosionMedium

  Evaluates Python grid-search generation and hyperparameter optimization strategy. Strong answers yield lazy Cartesian-product combinations and discuss random search, Bayesian optimization, pruning, early stopping, and budget limits.

  PinterestData ScientistMachine LearningOnsite
• Prevent Vanishing Gradients in Deep NetworksHard

  Tests a candidate's mathematical understanding of the vanishing gradient problem in deep neural networks and their ability to evaluate architectural mitigations including weight initialization, activation functions, residual connections, and normalization layers.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerMachine LearningTechnical Screen
• Rank Newly Launched Ads Under Cold StartMedium

  Design a machine learning system to rank and explore cold-start ads launched within the past seven days, balancing marketplace revenue, user engagement, and advertiser budget delivery.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerML System DesignOnsite
• Reason About Nested JSON Schema ValidationMedium

  Design and implement a recursive JSON schema validator that checks nested objects and arrays, enforces required properties, and returns precise failure paths for validation errors.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Rebalance Experiment Buckets with Minimal ReassignmentMedium

  Implement a deterministic rebalancing algorithm that redistributes entities among experiment buckets to meet exact target counts while minimizing reassignments and applying canonical tie-breaking.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Reconstruct an Itinerary While Keeping an Unspecified Variant ExplicitMedium

  Tests finding an Eulerian path in a directed multigraph with lexicographical tie-breaking using Hierholzer's algorithm.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Reconstruct an Itinerary from Flight TicketsMedium

  Tests graph modeling, depth-first search (DFS), and Hierholzer's algorithm to construct an Eulerian path with lexicographical tie-breaking.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Reconstruct itinerary with lexicographic tiesMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's ability to model and traverse directed graphs with repeated edges, enforce lexicographic ordering among possible paths, and analyze time and space complexity for an algorithmic solution.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Reconstruct route from unordered travel ticketsMedium

  This problem tests your ability to model a graph where each edge represents a transition, requiring you to find a valid linear sequence that visits every node exactly once.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Remove and Compact a Parent-Index ForestMedium

  Tests tree traversal to find subtrees, array compaction, and index remapping on a parent-pointer forest representation without mutating input data.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Round numeric string valuesMedium

  This question evaluates parsing and numeric manipulation skills, specifically implementing rounding rules for numeric strings and handling decimals, significant digits, and precision edge cases.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Scheduling Four Apps at Once on Kubernetes and a Node-Feedback Scheduler PluginHard

  A Kubernetes scheduling exercise for a senior infrastructure role: four applications request scheduling at the same time, and the candidate must ask the questions that settle capacity, priority, placement and coordination, then commit to a plan. A second part designs a scheduler plugin that uses signals reported by nodes.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerSystem DesignTechnical Screen
• Select the Nearest Eligible ElevatorMedium

  Implement an elevator dispatch selection algorithm that finds the nearest eligible elevator for a passenger request based on floor, direction, and tie-breaking rules.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Senior Staff Infra Hiring Manager Screen: Career Arc, Reasons for Leaving, Team FitHard

  A hiring manager conversation for a senior staff backend infrastructure role covering a walkthrough of the last ten years of a career, the reasons for leaving a current job, and how past work maps to the team's technical challenges. It tests narrative focus, staff-level scope and honest self-assessment.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerBehavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
• Settle Group Expenses with TransfersMedium

  This question evaluates the ability to compute and reconcile per-person financial balances from transactional data and to translate net liabilities into direct transfers, exercising skills in numeric bookkeeping and data aggregation.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Settle Shared-Expense Debts, Then Reduce the Number of PaymentsMedium

  A coding question about settling shared expenses: turn a list of debts between people into payments that leave everyone even, first with no limit on the number of payments and then with as few payments as possible. It tests net-balance reasoning, matching payers with receivers, heap usage, and judging whether a greedy settlement is truly minimal.

  PinterestData EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Settle a Group Tab With the Fewest Possible PaymentsMedium

  Turn a list of recorded debts between friends into a list of payments that settles every balance, first with any valid list and then with the fewest payments possible, using net-balance accounting and a backtracking search over who pays whom.

  PinterestData EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Settle debts with minimal transactionsMedium

  Pinterest software-engineer onsite coding question: given a list of debts as (debtor, creditor, amount) triples, return settlement transfers that clear every net balance using the minimum number of transactions. It tests reducing to net balances, recognizing the problem is NP-hard, backtracking with pruning to find the optimum for small N, and a heap-based greedy heuristic plus correctness and time/space complexity analysis for large, skewed debt graphs.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Size an Opportunity and Present It with Clear VisualsMedium

  Tests your ability to size an ambiguous product opportunity using top-down and bottom-up estimation, stress-test core assumptions with sensitivity analysis, and design executive-ready visuals to guide strategic investment decisions.

  PinterestData ScientistAnalytics & ExperimentationOnsite
• Solve Expression and Tree-List ProblemsMedium

  This problem tests recursive backtracking for expression generation and pointer manipulation for in-place tree-to-linked-list conversion.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Solve Four Interview Coding ProblemsMedium

  This set tests proficiency in graph algorithms, binary search on sorted data, grid simulations, and custom data structure design for real-time leaderboards.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsOnsite
• Solve Multiple Coding Interview ProblemsMedium

  Tests breadth-first search and bipartite/dual-graph modeling to find the minimum number of transit lines needed to travel between two stops.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Solve Two Grid Search ProblemsMedium

  This problem tests your ability to navigate 2D grids and apply graph traversal algorithms to identify connected components and calculate propagation distances.

  PinterestSoftware EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
• Solve a 9x9 Sudoku puzzleHard

  This question evaluates algorithmic problem-solving skills focused on constraint satisfaction, state-space search, and implementation correctness for combinatorial puzzles.

  PinterestMachine Learning EngineerCoding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen