Perplexity SWE interview - phone screen to onsite, waiting on results
Perplexity SWE interview - phone screen to onsite, waiting on results
Phone screen was suspiciously easy 🤨. One LC medium (merge intervals) and a 15-minute discussion about how a search API handles scale and freshness. Done with time to spare. Genuinely didn't know what to make of it.
Onsite was 3 rounds. First was the harder one: design a real-time web indexing pipeline and how you'd balance crawling fresh content against bandwidth costs. Second was coding: implement a ranking function for search results given relevance scores and freshness weights. Third was behavioral plus a freeform discussion about what I thought was broken in current search products.
The process felt very startup. No formal platform, just video calls with senior engineers who wanted to see how I think. No HackerRank, no CodeSignal. I appreciated that.
Been 10 days since the onsite. Recruiter said they'd be in touch.
Replies (4)
the startup process vibe is real. it's actually harder in some ways because you can't prep for a fixed question bank
10 days is still in normal range for a small company. i'd send a nudge around day 12-14
the indexing pipeline design question is solid signal about what they actually care about. makes sense for a search company
did they ask anything about their actual product or how perplexity search works internally?
the freeform search discussion was basically that. they wanted genuine opinions not flattery. i had some critiques about source attribution that went over well