KLA Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 138 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at KLA.
KLA
Software Engineer Intern
Intern Average Positive experience Accept offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Technical screen Recruiter call Onsite
Interview formats
Technical Coding Behavioral
After I applied, I got an email for an interview. The first round was technical, involving a LeetCode easy-medium heap question. For most candidates, the next and final round is with a manager, which is more behavioral and includes some general technical questions about pointers and memory. You should know about KLA and your reasons for wanting to join them.
Confirmed questions4 questions
- Why do you want to join KLA?
- What is your understanding of KLA?
- Can you solve a LeetCode easy-medium question about heaps?
KLA
Software Engineer
Senior Average Positive experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding
I had a video call interview with KLA Chennai. It was a panel interview online where I was given a coding question. They used a coding platform with test cases. The panel was patient and gave hints. The coding round was of moderate difficulty, involving an arraylist-like solution. I missed the syntax for C++ stl, which led to not being selected for the next round.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Can you introduce yourself and describe your experience with different tech stacks?
- Could you write the code for the given problem and ensure it passes all test cases?
KLA
Software Engineer
Entry Difficult Negative experience No offer 3 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Technical screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Coding Technical System Design
I applied on LinkedIn and got a call from HR after 2 days. They said they would get back to me, and a month later they did. I had almost forgotten about it. They mentioned there would be three technical rounds, with two happening in quick succession. This made me lose interest. The first round was a coding interview, the second was problem-solving, and the third focused on design patterns. They shared sample questions, but they weren't very helpful. During the interviews, the panel asked difficult, lengthy questions that were hard to read and process in the given time.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Can you introduce yourself and discuss your previous work experiences?
KLA Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from KLA interview reports.
“You are given a binary string S of '0's and '1's. Your task is to move all '1's to the rightmost positions while keeping their original relative order. The cost for moving is calculated as follows: choosing a '1' costs 1 unit, and each step to move a '1' one position to the right costs 1 unit. A '1' cannot be moved if the adjacent right position is already filled with another '1'. Also, you cannot select a '1' that is unable to move. What is the maximum time required to move all the '1's to the end?”
Read reports →“How would you calculate the distance to find the nearest cab within a 3km radius, ensuring you consider the actual one-way road distance rather than a straight-line path between two points?”
Read reports →“Given n, an array of size n, and a value d, find the number of ways to complete projects from 3 groups, with deadlines given by the array elements, such that the total time is d and no two consecutive projects are from the same group.”
Read reports →“How would you create a heterogeneous linked list that can hold any type of object (int, double, Node, Complex, float, etc.) using templates, especially if there's no common base class like CObject available?”
Read reports →“Design a publisher-subscriber system for a scenario with multiple priority queues (M priority queues, each of size N, and inter-queue priority levels 0, 1, 2, 3...). Assume T writer threads and T reader threads. How many synchronization objects would be needed for this setup?”
Read report →“What specific information should a cab driver's device transmit in its heartbeat signal? For instance, should it include time, the driver's active/passive state, and GPS location?”
Read report →“Can you determine if a path exists from start to destination in a 2D matrix with 1s, 0s, and walls, where you can move in 4 directions and break a wall (turning it into a path) after visiting it twice? 1 is a path, 0 is no path.”
Read report →“What's the overhead of a thread sleeping within a critical section? What about the cost of context switching? What are the advantages of using a spinlock? Explain the mechanism behind critical section spinlocks.”
Read report →“How would you process an array of words to remove all anagrams and then present only unique words? Suggest an optimized approach using unordered_map and explain what predicate is used to find an element within it (is it an overloaded hash_key(), a class::operator() for hash comparison, or a global compare function?). Write production-ready code for this.”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 138 KLA interview reports.