Patreon Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 196 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Which role are you interviewing for?
30 roles · 196 reportsCandidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Patreon.
Patreon
Data Scientist
Staff Average Positive experience Accept offer 6 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Onsite Offer
Interview formats
Technical Coding Behavioral Case Presentation
The process started with a recruiter call, then a technical SQL screen, followed by a behavioral interview with the hiring manager. After that, there were 4 onsite interviews covering Experimentation/Causal Inference, Statistics, Product Partnership, and Core Values. The recruiting team was really responsive and helped schedule around my availability. The onsite interviews felt pretty standard for a Data Scientist role, focusing on scenarios specific to Patreon that might come up on the job. The team seemed engaged and passionate.
Confirmed questions3 questions
- What are alternative ways to measure the impact of a product change when A/B testing is not feasible?
- Describe a situation where a colleague or teammate successfully persuaded you to change your perspective.
- Given a scenario where a key metric (Metric A) has declined by 10% over the past three months, outline your diagnostic approach to identify the underlying causes.
Patreon
Communications Specialist
Mid Average Neutral experience No offer 6 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen Group Presentation Background check Offer
Interview formats
Behavioral Technical Presentation
The interview process for the Communications role was structured as follows: a recruiter call, followed by an interview with the hiring manager, then three cross-functional interviews, and finally a core values interview. While the interview structure itself was straightforward and the people I met with provided great insights into the company and the role, the recruiting process was quite disorganized. Communication was slow, interviews were often delayed, and I frequently lacked updates for days. One interview was even cancelled last minute and rescheduled, but the new interviewer hadn't been informed. Despite the positive interactions with team members, the communication issues and inconsistencies from recruiting felt disrespectful of my time.
Confirmed questions1 question
- What makes you want to join Patreon?
Patreon
Software Engineer
Mid Difficult Positive experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen
Interview formats
Coding Technical
The process was pretty standard. I only made it to the first technical round. I started with a recruiter chat, which was nice. They were pretty responsive and gave some prep materials, which helped a little. They said 'study everything,' which was good advice, mentioning coding basics and data structures. I guess Patreon focuses more on real-world problems. I was bummed because I solved both coding questions, but I couldn't run the code for the second one before time ran out, though it would have worked. I got rejected the next day, which confused me. The questions were tough for me, so I probably wasn't very clear in explaining my thought process.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Can you write a function that simulates a terminal's path navigation? Given a current path and a new path, it should handle moving up directories using '..'. For instance, with a current path of '/a/x' and a new path like 'w/y/../q', the expected output is '/a/x/w/q'.
- Could you implement a rate limiter that permits N requests per second? When a request arrives, first remove any requests that are older than one second. Then, if the count of requests within the last second is fewer than N, accept it and record its timestamp; otherwise, reject it.
Patreon
Machine Learning Engineer
Mid Average Positive experience No offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Take home Onsite Panel Background check Offer
Interview formats
Coding Technical System Design Behavioral
The interview process was smooth, clear, and prompt. They sent over a PDF detailing each upcoming interview and provided feedback shortly after every call. I really enjoyed going through it. The people I met were nice and skilled, and they seemed to really care about the company culture. I managed to clear all the interviews, but unfortunately, I didn't get the offer. What's really cool though is that after all the interviews, they gave me *detailed* feedback on how I did, which is super unusual and incredibly helpful. What a company!
Confirmed questions3 questions
- A coding problem was given, which was fairly straightforward although one problem was intentionally not well-defined.
- I didn't do perfect on the ML system design.
- I didn't do perfect on the behavioral questions.
Patreon Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Patreon interview reports.
“Given a `coin_toss` function simulating a fair coin, how would you create a function that generates a random number uniformly distributed between 0 and N?”
Read reports →“How can one call an API and then process the retrieved data using Python?”
Read reports →“Can you merge as many integer intervals as possible from a given array?”
Read reports →“How would you modify an LRU cache to include a time-to-live (TTL) feature?”
Read reports →“Given a nested dictionary representing an organization, write a Python function to identify managers and return ('manager', numberOfDirectReports, numberOfTotalPeopleReporting) for managers, and ('IC', 0, 0) for individual contributors.”
Read report →“What is the maximum number of books you can buy given quantities and costs of bundles?”
Read report →“Can you write a function that simulates a terminal's path navigation? Given a current path and a new path, it should handle moving up directories using '..'. For instance, with a current path of '/a/x' and a new path like 'w/y/../q', the expected output is '/a/x/w/q'.”
Read report →“Can you write code to find and display missing numbers from a sorted list of 1-99 in a specific format?”
Read report →“Could you make a simple ASCII GUI for it that will modify its behavior for symbol/upper/lower/number generation?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 196 Patreon interview reports.