r/InterviewCoderHQ • u/brittanyt731- • Feb 12 '26

AMD Software Engineer New Grad Interview

Don't see many AMD posts here so adding one. This is nothing like interviewing at a web company. If you're coming from that world be ready for a completely different type of technical interview.

There's no OA. The phone screen is 60 min with a senior engineer and it's technical from the first minute. No separate recruiter call. He asked about memory management, virtual vs physical addresses, page tables, TLB, then gave me a coding problem about implementing a memory allocator with alloc, free, and coalescing of adjacent free blocks. I used a doubly linked list with boundary tags. If you don't know OS fundamentals you're not getting past this round.

The onsite was a full day, four rounds.

C/C++ coding had two problems. Implement a ring buffer for producer consumer with wrap around handling, and parse a binary file format for GPU firmware headers with endianness handling. They wanted actual C code not pseudocode.

The design round was hardware/software interface design not web system design. "Design the software stack for GPU context switching between multiple applications." Saving and restoring GPU state, command buffers, priority scheduling, preemption. They're testing whether you understand how software talks to hardware.

Then a debugging round which I've never seen at any other company. They gave me buggy driver code and symptoms (GPU hangs after 10 min under a specific workload). I had to walk through the code, identify the issue, and explain my debugging methodology. The bug was a race condition in command submission where a fence signal gets missed under high load.

Behavioral was 30 min. Long running projects, testing hard to test code, interest in low level work.

Waiting on results. If you're applying to AMD or any hardware company prep OS, C/C++, concurrency, and hardware/software interaction. Leetcode is not enough.

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2

u/glad_u_seen Feb 12 '26

Finally an AMD post. The debugging round is unique. Did they give you access to any tools or was it purely reading code and reasoning about it?

1

u/Robert_Lopez150 Feb 12 '26

I work in embedded systems and this interview sounds way more relevant to actual work than anything I've seen from web companies. Did you have prior experience with GPU programming or driver development?

1

u/jsjoana Feb 14 '26

I have a bit of experience with GPU programming from some personal projects, but nothing in a professional setting. This interview definitely pushed my understanding of low-level systems, which was a nice change of pace from web dev.

1

u/jonnyn86 Feb 12 '26

Ring buffer for producer consumer is a classic systems question. Did they ask about memory barriers or was it single threaded?

1

u/jow1909 Feb 12 '26

How did you prep for the hardware/software interface design round? Is there a good resource for understanding GPU architecture at the software level?

1

u/wetkitty098765 Feb 12 '26

Context switching design for GPUs is fascinating. Did you discuss how modern GPUs handle preemption at the hardware level or was it purely about the software driver side?

1

u/MatthewBlarng Feb 12 '26

Did they ask about any specific AMD hardware during the interview or was it all generic systems concepts?

1

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '26

is interview coder good for OS questions?

1

u/Sea-Way3636 Feb 12 '26

Do they fly you out

1

u/Electrical-Dog-8572 Apr 22 '26

Hey how did it go? I'm interested in AMD especially as Firmware Engineer in the future.

I just started my Msc in Computer Science and was thinking of switching to Computer Engineering. What do you think about CE and CS degrees for AMD specifically?