NerdWallet Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I was encouraged to apply for this Staff Software Engineer role by the hiring manager. After an initial chat, I did a CoderPad challenge with Leetcode-style problems, which felt like gatekeeping. Then, I had interviews with the team lead and two engineers. The team lead was helpful and even gave me prep advice. I felt I did really well in these interviews, with one interviewer noting I did "amazingly well." The recruiter said they were waiting for final feedback, and it seemed like an offer was coming. However, I received a generic rejection saying they chose a more qualified candidate, claiming the roles were competitive. A short time later, I saw the exact same job reposted, with no updates on LinkedIn. This experience felt like the company was just going through the motions for a role that might not have been real, which was emotionally taxing. Candidates deserve transparency.

So the interview process is pretty sweet. They ask you to bring your own computer, but they got one if you can't. This was honestly the best interview I've had so far. It was supposed to be like a 7-8 hour day, but it only took 4 hours so my brain wasn't fried. They asked practical, real-world questions, not just algorithms. Apparently, they think algorithms can be figured out from real-world problems and that's something our industry misses but NerdWallet doesn't. I got asked back the next day for another 1.5-hour chat with the engineering manager and a lead from another team because they thought I was a good fit from my performance. The recruiter was amazing with communication and was super excited and honest. I got a tour of the office and asked about the day-to-day stuff. By the end, I was definitely ready for the next steps.

So first I had a recruiter screen, which was pretty standard. But honestly, the recruiters weren't great. Their emails were brief and unclear, and they were slow to give feedback throughout the whole thing. After I was rejected, they didn't even tell me why. Next up was a technical phone screen. It was one problem, you could use any language. Java was a bit tricky because the provided code was confusing and I needed to ask questions to get it. It was a LeetCode Easy/Medium type, a JSON serialization problem needing recursion and string manipulation, not exactly from LeetCode though. Then came the virtual on-site because of COVID. It had three technical rounds and one behavioral. The first technical was an algorithm round, a common LeetCode design question I'd seen before, so I did it easily, even two ways. The second was system design, which was cool. The problem was detailed, not just 'design X', and required a lot of back-and-forth with the interviewer. I enjoyed that one. The third was a weird hybrid of coding and design. It was unclear what to focus on, and the interviewer wouldn't give hints. It involved a simple system design and then writing pseudocode for its APIs, plus some SQL. I wasn't sure how I did on that one. After the on-site, they took over two weeks to give me a 'no', without any explanation. Just bad luck sometimes, I guess.