Pandora Ios Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process is not really great for finding good people. The way they do it is they just keep asking questions until you mess up. So if you make one mistake, they forget all the good answers you gave and just focus on the one you got wrong. I passed my first interview with tough questions. By the second interview, I already had two other job offers. I think I missed mentioning a feature in one of the questions. The next day, I accepted another offer and was glad I didn't wait for their two-week response. The questions are all over the place, sometimes they repeat and don't lead to a clear outcome. For example, if they ask you three difficult questions about memory management and you answer them correctly, but then later they ask a simpler question on the same topic and you miss it, you fail. It doesn't matter if you answered harder questions correctly before. That's why I think their strategy is just to ask until you fail.

So the interview process started with a recruiter phone screen where they asked me some iOS questions. Since I'm local, we skipped the technical phone screen and they set up an on-site interview for me. About two weeks later, I went in for the on-site. It was supposed to be two 30-minute interviews with two engineers, then a final 30-minute interview with the hiring manager. However, I didn't do so well in the second interview, so I didn't get to the third one. The hiring manager just thanked me and walked me out, saying I should apply again when I have more experience and that the interviewers enjoyed talking to me. It was a pretty positive experience overall. The recruiter was super helpful and friendly, and the first on-site interviewer was great too - really down-to-earth and helped me out when I got stuck on an algorithm. The second interviewer though, didn't seem very engaged, checked his phone a bit, and rushed me out. But the hiring manager was really nice, and so was the staff setting things up.

I applied through an internal referral. The process took 2 months. Of all the interviews I attended, Pandora has a perfect process. They ask questions that are relevant to the role. It started off with a discussion with the recruiter and a couple of technical phone calls before the onsite interview in Oakland. The questions tested if one has a deep understanding of iOS development and also data structures. Most of the questions asked were usual leet code questions and iOS development questions. In person interviews consisted of 6 45-minute interviews where questions varied from general problem solving to iOS development. The interviewers were pretty friendly and open minded.