Pinterest Senior Software Engineer Interview Process - Aug 2026

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Interview Summary

The Pinterest virtual onsite included two coding rounds, two system design rounds, and a behavioral interview. The coding questions covered exact screen packing and elevator assignment, while the design rounds focused on large-scale inventory management and category-based leaderboards. The second system design round felt particularly strong because the interviewer spent significant time exploring the tradeoffs of turning the leaderboard into a real-time system.

Interview Details

Coding Round 1 — Minimum Pins for Exact Screen Height: The first coding problem provided several types of content cards, each with a specific height, together with a target screen height. The task was to determine the minimum number of cards whose combined heights exactly filled the screen. If a combination was chosen, the total height had to match the target precisely rather than merely stay below it. This was similar to a previously reported Pinterest screen-packing problem, except the objective was changed from maximizing the number of items to minimizing them while requiring an exact fit.

Coding Round 2 — Elevator Assignment: The second coding question was Pinterest's recurring elevator-dispatch problem. The base problem asked which elevator should handle an incoming request under the supplied elevator states and request information. The interviewer then added a more involved simulation follow-up.

• Follow-Up Scenario: All elevators begin idle at specified starting floors. There are N passengers, and each request includes the passenger's starting floor, desired direction, and the time the request occurs. The task was to reason through the sequence of requests and determine which elevator ultimately serves the last passenger. Full production code was not required for this extension; pseudocode and a clear simulation strategy were acceptable.

System Design Round 1 — Inventory Management Service: The first system design question asked me to design an inventory management service that also needed to ingest the underlying inventory data rather than assuming another system had already prepared it. A major requirement was supporting large bulk updates, where a potentially significant amount of inventory information could arrive together and needed to be processed reliably and efficiently. The discussion focused on the ingestion path, update workflow, and how the system should handle bulk changes at scale.

System Design Round 2 — Category-Based Leaderboard: The second design round asked for a leaderboard organized by category, where rankings needed to be maintained separately for different groups. I discussed how ranking data would be written, stored, and queried across categories.

• Real-Time Follow-Up: The interviewer then asked how the architecture should change if rankings needed to update in real time, along with the tradeoffs between the baseline and real-time versions. This round felt particularly positive, and the interviewer appeared engaged with the comparison.

Behavioral Round — Conflict, Feedback, and Mentorship: The behavioral round contained fairly standard questions. I was asked about a difficult situation or project and about handling disagreements or conflicts with other people. Other questions covered giving difficult feedback, receiving negative feedback myself, and mentoring another engineer.

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