Cruise Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 128 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Cruise.
Cruise
Software Engineer
Mid Average Negative experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding
They had a short chat about my experience and resume, then threw a tough Leetcode problem at me. I nailed most of it, getting close to optimal, but stumbled a bit on edge cases. They even pushed for a strange way to solve it. Weirdly, they canceled the job posting right after, since someone else took a role just two days prior. Why even interview then?
Confirmed questions1 question
- Tell me about your experience and resume. Solve a hard Leetcode problem.
Cruise
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Average Negative experience Decline offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen Technical screen Onsite Offer
Interview formats
Behavioral Technical Coding
So first, I had a quick chat with a recruiter to see if I was interested and to get the lowdown on how the interviews would go. Then, another engineer hopped on a call for a technical interview. It was pretty straightforward, just an algorithms problem to weed out people who weren't a good fit. After that, the recruiter set up four more interviews back-to-back, each lasting an hour. Three of them were with folks on the team I would potentially join. These were all technical, but the first bit of each interview was more of a casual chat to see if I'd fit in with the team. I waited about a month for an offer after those, which felt like forever. I got a verbal offer, and they said the official one would come the next week. But then three months went by, and they kept pushing back the date for the official offer until they just stopped responding.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Can you describe an instance where a solution you proposed for a problem didn't work out as planned, and explain how you handled that situation?
Cruise
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Average Positive experience No offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Technical screen Onsite Background check Offer
Interview formats
Technical Coding System Design Behavioral
I was contacted by a Cruise recruiter about a Software Engineer in Test role. After passing the initial technical screen, I decided to pursue a different opportunity with another team focusing on remote assistance, for a full stack position. This role's interview process included a technical screen, followed by an onsite interview which involved coding challenges, system design, and a behavioral interview. The interviewers were supportive, and the questions were challenging yet reasonable. A great aspect was the recruiter's consistent and detailed feedback throughout the entire process, even after the rejection.
Confirmed questions3 questions
- A few algorithmic questions were asked.
- A typical system design question focused on cloud architecture.
- A front end challenge was presented.
Cruise Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Cruise interview reports.
“Find the total number of islands given a 2D array input of 1's and 0's (where "0" - Water and "1" - Island).”
Read reports →“Find a path from the start to the finish in a maze represented by a 2D array.”
Read reports →“Find the maximum difference between array elements a[i] and a[j] where i < j and a[i] < a[j], return -1 if none exists.”
Read reports →“Given a 2D array and some update instructions, increment values and then count how many elements have the highest value”
Read reports →“How do you find the maximum difference between two numbers in a list where the larger number must appear after the smaller number?”
Read report →“Design a system for API rate limiting per user, where each user has a bucket with a max size and a leak rate.”
Read report →“Can you solve the Minesweeper game problem given the board representation? The board contains 'M' for unrevealed mines, 'E' for unrevealed empty squares, 'B' for revealed blank squares with no adjacent mines, digits '1' to '8' for the count of adjacent mines, and 'X' for revealed mines. You need to return the game board after the game is played.”
Read report →“Can you create a fixed-size memory pool where blocks are of size Y and there are X blocks? The block request and freeing operations should take O(n) time.”
Read report →“Could you write a function to count valid paths in a 2D array of 0s and 1s, moving from the top-left to the bottom-right without crossing any 1s?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 128 Cruise interview reports.