Plaid phone interview

Following this post, I have mine coming up too.

Following this. Did your interview already happen ?

In my experience, both coding + technical deep dive rounds at Plaid feel very similar to real-life code/design review at Google. I didn't have to Leetcode. The only prep I did was scheduling my Uber onsite the day before to warm up. In the practical coding round, you get a multi-milestone mildly contrived non-Leetcode problem that's similar to an interesting coding problem you might run into at work yourself. The ones I got were all themed like problems that real Plaid engineers might have to work on. If you're not familiar with practical coding, an example might be (if you work in Search) to, given a stream of search queries tagged with topics, identify trending topics and when they start/stop trending; a second milestone might be to also pick up when topics start re-trending after they stop. Usually they expect you to get 2+ milestones into the problem, but that's not always the case and the interviewer will articulate their expectation. For coding, the expectation is that you show a little bit of thought- they don't expect optimality and neither of mine asked me for big-O analysis (in fact, I started doing big-O analysis when weighing my approaches and got redirected by the interviewer to prioritize a clean working solution first). Pick your data structures carefully and articulate your reasoning. The other thing is that they look for 'spikes,' strengths that you have that you would bring to Plaid. If you go into the interview knowing your strengths and how you'll demonstrate them, it'll probably pay off a lot. Know what you prioritize and enjoy relative to the average smart engineer at your level, e.g., your Google coworkers. Technical deep dive is simple: you come in with a slide of the system you built/worked on, and talk to another engineer who is curious about your design decisions (they ask about tradeoffs), the overall architecture, and the process of building what you built (who you collaborated with, etc.), and really just keeps asking you questions until they have a strong understanding of what you built, how, and why. So pretend you were describing your recent launch at a demo/eng review to a bunch of senior engineers from another PA, and the bulk of it was structured as a Q&A. Again a good idea to know what 'spikes' you want to show off, so know your strengths on the design side. As with any interview, convince them you're someone they'd want to work with. Their interviews are overall very "real-world." So prioritize the same things you do in real-world/on-the-job coding and design: clarity, correctness, etc. Your coding rounds will not be on some online site but instead you'll be screensharing your dev environment. Good luck!

Hello OP, How did your interview go?

The question was simple LC medium. Technical deep dive was just talking about my previous project. Not sure what they were looking for though… I got a rejection email 3 days after the interview

How’d it go op