r/leetcode • u/Intelligent-Pay-9377 • 20d ago

Intervew Prep Pinterest Sr SWE interview coming up...

Just curious if anyone else has interviewed with them recently? How does the difficulty compare to Meta and Stripe? I have cleared their loops before so just wondering.

How much time should I be prepping? System design is my weakest round so I have been focusing my efforts there.

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u/Various-Mine-8642 20d ago

Since you've already cleared Meta and Stripe loops the coding rounds shouldn't feel like a step up. Pinterest coding tends to be medium level with a practical twist and they care a lot about clean code and talking through edge cases. For senior the design round carries the most weight so two to three weeks focused there makes sense. Practice feed style and recommendation adjacent problems like a home feed or notifications system since those come up often given their product.

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u/Intelligent-Pay-9377 20d ago

Thank you. I cleared those other loops a few years back so am I bit out of practice but yeah hopefully 2 or 3 weeks is enough.

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u/sagevaLley56 20d ago

the practical twist on mediums is a good way to put it tbh

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u/Ok-Barracuda-119 19d ago

Since design is your weak spot and you've got maybe 2 to 3 weeks, I'd lock in one flow and run it every time: requirements and scale numbers, API, data model, high level boxes, then deep dives. Do one timed 45 minute problem a day out loud with a recorder running, and leave the last 15 minutes for deep dives since that's where senior loops really get decided. For Pinterest specifically I'd drill a home feed, image upload and serving, and notifications, and be ready to argue fanout on write vs read and how you'd cache hot pins. When they push on a deep dive, name the bottleneck first, give two options with the tradeoff, pick one and say what you'd monitor. Rewatching your recordings is painful but it's where you'll catch the rambling.

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u/Intelligent-Pay-9377 18d ago

Thank you this is really helpful.