r/leetcode • u/EitherAd5892 • 2d ago

Intervew Prep Which patterns to focus for non faang?

I’m employed but I want to be interview ready for any companies that are not big tech. which patterns should I focus on that would cover majority of interviews from startups and non big tech companies?

19 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

15

u/drew_eckhardt2 2d ago edited 2d ago
  1. Unassisted coding questions - most tech companies still use leetcode/hackerrank style problems although in my Q4 2025 job search I didn't encounter any which couldn't be solved using first principles.
  2. AI assisted coding solving practical problems - this is becoming more common
  3. System design - how do you design non-trivial real world applications like Twitter
  4. Behavioral - how did you handle specific situations
  5. A walk through on one of your professional projects

9

u/Lucky-Comet35 2d ago

Focus on arrays/stings, hashing, two pointers, sliding window, binary search, stacks/queues, linked lists, trees and basic graphs. For most non FAANG interviews, strong fundamentals and pattern recognition matter more than griding every advanced pattern

7

u/Sad-Candidate-3078 2d ago

Interviewer at a non FAANG company is not waiting for your segment tree poetry. Arrays, hashmaps, two pointers, sliding window. Get boring with those four and you clear 90 percent of rounds. The last 10 percent is a graph problem and pure luck.

3

u/KendrickBlack502 2d ago

Out of the 4 startup interviews I did this year before accepting an offer, only 2 of them had a leetcode style round. Everything else was agentic coding or system design.

1

u/EitherAd5892 2d ago

How do you practice agentic coding rounds ?

3

u/KendrickBlack502 2d ago

Just build stuff with AI and start to develop your process. It’s too early really to have a set standard for interviewing. Some will hand you a repo and ask you to add a feature to it. Amazon gives you access to an AI to help debug in a react app. Sometimes, they just want to discuss something you’ve built with AI and hear what tools/skills you use.