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Pinterest Interview Questions Pinterest Interview Reports Engineering at Pinterest Career Levels and Compensation

Someone at Pinterest says...

Very "Pinteresty" environment, DIY, and artsy. Great for those who have a creative passion. Will have random fun events, KnitCon, and can attend studio nights taught by an employee. Lots of work to do, especially in ads and visual search. You will have a lot of impact with the work you do. Very methodical with growth, which leads to building a better product (w/ ads) - Ben, CEO, has a great vision & direction and is very inspirational. Biggest gripe is the amount of people who are not passionate about the company/product. Start developing engineers in house rather than hiring so many outside people, who also may not even care for the product. Also, start looking more at culture fit like other tech companies do.

Pinterest Interview Questions

Note: ensure you read the disclaimer on the previous page reading the accuracy and sourcing of these problems.

Levenshtein Edit Distance

An edit distance is a way to quantify how different two strings are. This is calculated using **the minimum number of transformations to turn one string to another**. The transformations include insertion , deletion , and substitution . So when comparing two identical strings, say cat and ca...

Difficulty: 7/10

Traverse in a Zig Zag

Here's a fun one: can you write a method to return the nodes of a binary tree lessons an intro to binary trees and search trees in a zig zag level order? It should return a multi dimensional array of arrays, with each child array being a level of the tree. That's a mouthful, so here's an...

Difficulty: 6/10

Implement the Trie Data Structure

Suppose you're asked during an interview to design an autocompletion system. On the client side, you have an input box. When users start typing things into the input, it should parse what's been typed and make suggestions based on that. For example, if the user has typed "cat", we may fetch "c...

Difficulty: 7/10

Sum Digits Until One

We're provided a positive integer num . Can you write a method to repeatedly add all of its digits until the result has only one digit? Here's an example: if the input was 49 , we'd go through the following steps: start with 49 4 9 13 since the previous addition was 13, move ont...

Difficulty: 4/10

Max of Min Pairs

We have an array of length 2 * n even length that consists of random integers. 1, 3, 2, 6, 5, 4 We are asked to create pairs out of these integers, like such: 1, 3 , 2, 6 , 5, 4 How can we divide up the pairs such that the sum of smaller integers in each pair is maximized? ...

Difficulty: 4/10

Implement a Binary Search Tree

Let's implement a Binary Search Tree ! Recall that a binary search tree , or a BST , is a binary tree lessons an intro to binary trees and search trees that is ordered via these two properties: 1. The left sub tree of a node has a value less than or equal to its parent node's value. 2. The ...

Difficulty: 6/10

How Out of Order

*This was submitted by user Hackleman.* Determine how "out of order" a list is by writing a function that returns the number of inversions in that list. Two elements of a list L , L i and L j , form an inversion if L i j . For example, the list 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 has 10 inversi...

Difficulty: 5/10

Majority Element

Suppose we're given an array of numbers like the following: 4, 2, 4 Could you find the majority element? A majority is defined as "the greater part, or more than half, of the total. It is a subset of a set consisting of more than half of the set's elements." Let's assume that the array l...

Difficulty: 3/10

Nth Smallest Number in a Stream

Many modern programming languages have the notion of a stream. A stream is a resource _that's broken down_ and sent usually over a network in small chunks. Imagine a video that's playing it would be inefficient to need to download an entire 1 gigabyte movie before being able to watch it. Inste...

Difficulty: 7/10

Introduction to Progressive Web Applications

Progressive Web Applications are apps that are intended to be used both in browser and on mobile devices. They load like regular web pages but can offer user functionality such as working offline, push notifications, and device hardware access traditionally available only to native applications. ...

Difficulty: 5/10

Introduction to Dynamic Programming

Introduction to Dynamic Programming Dynamic Programming is a powerful technique used to solve complex problems efficiently. It is an algorithmic paradigm that breaks down a problem into smaller overlapping subproblems and stores the solutions of these subproblems to avoid redundant computations...

Difficulty: 5/10

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineer Interview Questions

Introduction Artificial intelligence engineering is an emerging field focused on developing AI algorithms, models, and systems to solve complex problems. As AI continues to grow, there is **increasing demand across industries** for engineers who can design, build, and optimize AI products and s...

Difficulty: 5/10

Interview Reports

Holberton School grad Jinji is now a Pinterest Software Apprentice! Read about his background as a professional musician and his journey to learn to code.

From Musician to Pinterest Software Engineer with Holberton School ...

Software Engineer

Holberton School grad Jinji is now a Pinterest Software Apprentice! Read about his background as a professional musician and his journey to learn to code.

#103: Madelyn Tavarez - How a Part-time Bootcamp Helped her Become an Andro...

Software Engineer

Pinterest's engineering manager, Makinde Adeagbo, talked to TechRepublic about his jobs at Facebook and Dropbox, working best under pressure, and taking breaks from the tech world.

Makinde Adeagbo: Software Engineer. Challenge seeker. Track coach....

Software Engineer

Pinterest's engineering manager, Makinde Adeagbo, talked to TechRepublic about his jobs at Facebook and Dropbox, working best under pressure, and taking breaks from the tech world.

Site Reliability Engineer: Khan Academy Career Profile...

Site Reliability Engineer

Ruth works as a site reliability engineer for Pinterest to help improve the experience for engineers. Discover more about her career path, responsibilities, and salary with this Khan Academy Career Pr...

People at Pinterest Say

This information was sourced from reviews originally posted on Glassdoor.

There's lots of opportunity for individual engineers to make big impact (if you are ambitious). For example, two frontend developers created a new feature in their spare time, and it's going to be launched later this year. The company is still paying down some big tech debt, so product velocity has been slow for the past few years. Need faster execution. Amazon/Google/Instabook are innovating faster than before, and are on track to catch up.

I've interned at Pinterest, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Out of all of them, I chose to return to Pinterest for full-time because I found my fellow employees here were extremely passionate about the product. During my internship, my team gave me all of the "cool" tasks because they wanted me to enjoy my internship. There were also plenty of intern events organized, and housing or stipends offered. I made a lot of long-lasting friends while interning here, and so ultimately chose to sign a return offer and now work full-time. The company is growing now and isn't as small as it was during my internship. At the time there were around 500 employees, but now it has more than doubled.

I had a great time as an intern at Pinterest. On the recruiting side of things, the University Recruiting team put together plenty of cool events, and they did a great job of selecting a diverse group of kind, considerate people. I was on a small team and got to work on two features: one shipped, and one did not. My team made me feel like I was part of the company even though I was only an intern, and I made some great connections over the summer. I'll always look back fondly on my Pinternship. The internship's a lot of work, and there were a few days I was in the office pretty late trying to get code in before branch cut the next day. Other than that, it's a good work/life balance.

Attracts a lot of average product managers and strong designers applying for product-design centric company. However, we have a lot of trouble attracting and keeping seasoned engineers. We also tend to attract micro-managing engineering managers who like to run teams like sweat shops focusing on tactics rather than strategy. Look deeper in the current restructuring. Those who are desperately promoting themselves might be bad apples in the making to further the toxic culture of the departed.