Picnic Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

After applying, I got an email with possible time slots for an interview with HR. I set it up, and the talk was nice and comfortable, more informal. I was asked about my previous work, projects, and university work, and of course to introduce myself and so on. I also got useful information about the process after this step and about what they expect from a person in this role. I got an assignment in GitHub afterward and had to solve it in 5 days. I was asked to complete a Java backend task focused on processing and transforming streamed data. The task involved working with JSON input/output, implementing filtering, grouping, and sorting logic, and respecting certain performance and time constraints. It was a well-structured exercise that simulated a real-world engineering scenario and reflected Picnic’s strong coding standards. After about a week, I received a rejection, but a very detailed code review with things they wanted me to do better, like better software engineering practices overall. I felt bad because I gave my best and made a few stupid errors, but still, it is for a junior position, and I was disappointed a little bit.

First, I had a call with HR where they asked me questions like 'tell me about yourself', 'why you want to work with picnic', and 'your background'. Then, they sent me a take-home assignment that I had 7 days to complete. I spent about 6 days on it, and it involved showing some gifs. It took them a really long time, almost 6 days, to review my code! In my opinion, that's way too long, maybe 20 minutes max to review. It would be better to review candidate code in 3-4 days. After that, they rejected me and sent a PDF with feedback. Some of their comments were valid, but they also seemed to mock parts of my readme, using phrases like 'seems pretty off' twice, and even wrongly assumed I used AI for a paragraph I wrote myself. I think my assignment was 90% okay, with some room for improvement, but they rejected me over small mistakes, personal opinions, and incorrect assumptions.

This startup pitches itself as the next big thing, expecting to make billions soon, despite being around for over 5 years. It felt more like a typical corporate grind, where value is determined by a checklist of criteria, likely borrowed from successful tech giants. The interviewers seemed disengaged, sticking to their script. I had to chase HR for an interview slot and feedback, with responses like 'Sorry, I forgot.' Ultimately, I was rejected for not showing enough 'motivation' to join. The process involved: An HR interview (30min), a home assignment (2-4h) requiring perfect, up-to-date Java code with extensive tests and documentation, a technical review of the project (60-90min) including hypothetical 'what if' scenarios contrary to the project's stated scope, a behavioral interview (30min) asking about long-term aspirations with the company, and an algorithms interview (60-90min) rated easy-medium on LeetCode, where understanding the problems was difficult due to internal jargon, also featuring 'what if' questions.