Pinterest SWE phone screen - passed to onsite

Hack2hire Community · 2026-06-03T19:30:00.029Z

Pinterest SWE phone screen - passed to onsite Applied through a referral. Recruiter reached out about two weeks later, phone screen scheduled for the following week. 45 minutes, one problem. Escape room game - design a data structure tracking players moving through rooms, with a leaderboard ranking by room number then entry time. Got through the base implementation in about 25 minutes, added the ranking logic, talked through edge cases. Interviewer was relaxed, asked a couple of follow-ups on ge...

User-subi7Jun 3, 2026

Pinterest SWE phone screen - passed to onsite

Interview Experiencespinterest

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Replies (3)

danaliu_sweJun 3, 2026

escape room comes up a lot there. make sure your getTop handles same-room tiebreaking by entry order - interviewers push on that

tomriley_engJun 3, 2026

had pinterest onsite last month. coding rounds weren't brutal but the custom problems have traps in the requirements. read carefully

alexnguyen_piJun 4, 2026

congrats. five rounds goes fast, they usually run them back to back. behavioral is shorter than expected, around 25 minutes

User-2mzx1Jun 4, 2026

does the system design vary by level or are they asking the same topics regardless?

kevinpham_sweJun 4, 2026

Reply to @User-2mzx1recruiter said 'large distributed systems focus' - not very helpful lol. prepping partitioning and retry patterns and hoping for the best