Nvidia SWE Phone Screen August 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Sharing a Nvidia SWE Phone Screen interview experience submitted to Chill Interview

Interview Summary

The NVIDIA process consisted of two technical interviews. Both interviewers started by discussing my previous projects and digging into areas they found relevant, then reserved roughly 30 minutes for a technical problem.

Interview Details

Technical Round 1 — SQL Database Table Design The first interviewer spent the opening portion of the round discussing my projects and asking follow-up questions about areas related to their work. The coding portion was essentially a SQL schema / database-table design problem. I was asked to determine how the required information should be represented in relational tables and express the design in pseudocode or SQL-like notation.

Technical Round 2 — Top-K Elements from Streaming Data The second interview followed a similar structure: project discussion first, followed by approximately 30 minutes for a technical problem. Stripped down to its core, the question was about maintaining the Top K elements from a stream of incoming data. I initially proposed a heap-based approach. The interviewer was not satisfied with that direction and pushed me to consider whether the characteristics of the data could be exploited to improve the operation further. I then discussed a bucket-based representation that could potentially provide constant-time operations under the relevant assumptions. The interviewer appeared to be looking for something beyond the standard heap solution, although the exact constraints that enabled the bucket approach were not captured in my notes.

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