Evernote Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 53 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Evernote.
Evernote
Software Engineer
Senior Easy Negative experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Take home
Interview formats
Coding Behavioral
Applied online and got a call within a week for a phone screen. Then an online interview was scheduled with an engineer. He gave me three links to write code which was confusing. He asked me why I put "US citizen" on my resume and made fun of it. He gave me one hour for the coding exercise but I finished it in 15 minutes. My code handled all test cases. He said other candidates had longer code but it didn't work for all test cases. He said I was weak in Java but couldn't give a good reason. They took nine days to get back to me saying I was a strong candidate but they were considering others.
Confirmed questions3 questions
- Could you parse a URL to extract the "a=b" pairs following the question mark, separated by commas?
- Can you explain why you included "US citizen" on your resume?
- Please elaborate on your weaknesses in Java.
Evernote
Software Engineer Android
Entry Average Positive experience No offer 6 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Take home Phone screen Onsite Background check Offer
Interview formats
Coding Technical Behavioral
I applied online and a recruiter got in touch via email. First, I had to do this Evernote coding challenge where they sent me a problem and I had to submit Java code. After that seemed okay, I had a 45-minute Skype interview with a software engineer where I wrote Java code on collabedit.com, and the questions weren't as hard as the on-site ones. My on-site interview started at 12:30pm. A recruiter met me, gave me a tour, and then I went to a room for my first interview with a product manager. She asked behavioral questions like "Why Evernote?" and "Tell me about a recent project." That lasted an hour. Then I had four technical interviews back-to-back, each about an hour long. I was pretty wiped by the last one and felt I bombed the third interview. I guess they might look for people who can think non-stop without breaks, which I guess I'm not. No breaks were offered, though someone did get me sparkling water. It was still a good experience, and everyone was nice, the office looked cool with free stuff, and it seems like a good place for new grads.
Confirmed questions4 questions
- Write code to print abbreviated XML tags, like "<div>hello<span/></div>" from "<div>hello<span></span></div>", using tagStart(), tagText(), and tagEnd() functions.
- Find the nearest common ancestor of two given binary tree nodes.
- Design a class for a deck of cards, excluding jokers.
Evernote
Software Engineer
Mid Difficult Negative experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Phone screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding
The scheduling was a mess. After the first phone call, it took ages to get the next round set up, like almost 3 weeks. I had to chase the recruiter for updates and they'd take about a week to get back to me with the new schedule. They didn't give me much info on what to expect for the first round either. The interview itself had some communication issues with the interviewer, maybe they weren't trained well. I was given a Java app to debug, which was weird because I'm a Javascript dev. It would've been nice if the recruiter had sent an email with details beforehand. The interview was supposed to be 1 hour but went over to 1.5 hours.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Make the test pass.
Evernote Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Evernote interview reports.
“Find the nearest common ancestor of two given binary tree nodes.”
Read reports →“Implement a function to merge two sorted vectors into a new sorted vector, ensuring no duplicate elements.”
Read reports →“Write a C++ function to find the top 4 largest integers in an unsorted list in linear time.”
Read reports →“Write code to print abbreviated XML tags, like "<div>hello<span/></div>" from "<div>hello<span></span></div>", using tagStart(), tagText(), and tagEnd() functions.”
Read reports →“How would you find the k most frequent terms out of N given terms, with a frequency counting approach for words in a document? This needs to be achievable in O(N) time complexity.”
Read report →“Could you parse a URL to extract the "a=b" pairs following the question mark, separated by commas?”
Read report →“How would you insert an element into a linked list at a specific index k?”
Read report →“Could you match a string pattern against a list of names?”
Read report →“What's the difference between an Array and a LinkedList?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 53 Evernote interview reports.