Coursera

Role: Software Engineer

College: Purdue University

Interview Date: February 1, 2023

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Not Selected (or No Offer)

Difficulty: Medium-Hard

Rounds: At least Online Assessment/Coding Challenge

Topics Asked: Data Structures, Algorithms (Arrays, Hash Maps, Dynamic Programming, String Manipulation, Graph Theory)

Experience:

A candidate applied for a Software Engineer role after an initial invite to a coding challenge. The interview process is described as "extremely selective" with a 0% success rate reported for Software Engineer roles in New York, New York, based on 3 experiences.

Initial Coding Challenge / Online Assessment (OA)
The coding challenge typically involves standard mid-level questions found on platforms like LeetCode.

Specific questions mentioned across different experiences for Software Engineer roles include:

• Dominant numbers
• Magical numbers
• Text Justification (Hard difficulty: Given a sequence of words and a line width, format the text to fit within the specified width, justifying the text by distributing extra spaces evenly between words).
• Min cut problem (mentioned in an older experience from 2016).

Coursera's interview process for software engineers often starts with resume screening, followed by one or more online assessments focusing on coding and problem-solving. Candidates who pass the OA are typically invited for 2-3 phone screen interviews, which delve deeper into coding expertise and system design. The process culminates in an onsite interview with multiple rounds, including technical evaluations and behavioral discussions, known for being quite challenging.

General technical interview questions can include discussing approaches to solving problems with specific algorithms, explaining time and space complexity, implementing functions like checking for palindromes, differentiating between data structures like stacks and queues, and optimizing algorithms.