PayPal Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

After an initial chat with the recruiter, I got invited to a Karat interview scheduled for the weekend. The interview had three sections: intros, a partial project development, and a coding question. The Karat interviewer was really professional and helpful. The first two parts felt pretty easy if you've got experience and can talk through it. The coding question itself wasn't super hard, but the time given wasn't quite enough, which was my bad. My solution worked, even if it wasn't the most efficient. The main issue was coding in a text editor instead of my usual IDE, and when I ran into a snag, it ate up more time than I expected. I couldn't finish it during the interview, but I did after, and it worked fine. I'll get to retake it and hopefully do better next time. The Karat engineer was nice, professional, and helpful, knew the material, and gave answers when needed. One thing though, he asked me to change some code, and I spent a chunk of time on it, even though it wasn't strictly necessary.

The interview started with an online assessment on HackerRank, which was pretty basic, mostly checking coding skills and edge cases. Then, there were two rounds focused on Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) problems. One was similar to the 'House Robber' problem, likely solvable with dynamic programming or a greedy approach, and the other was like the 'largest rectangle in histogram' problem, which usually involves a monotonic stack. My advice is to practice array-based dynamic programming, common stack patterns, and be able to write clear O(n) solutions with proper tests.

The whole interview process wrapped up in about 2 weeks this January. They do a first hiring push from Sept-Oct when applications come in over the summer, and then a second round from Jan-Feb. I got an OA a couple days after applying, which had two Leetcode problems (Easy-Medium). The specific problem I got was on Leetcode's company list. After that, I was set up for 2 technical interviews. The first one was a typical Leetcode/DSA question, and the second was a fullstack task using raw HTML/JS. Both of those were on HackerRank. The interviewers are usually from the team you'd be interning with if you get the offer.