Pinwheel (NY) Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Started with a recruiter phone screen, then there was a take-home assignment focused on web scraping. After that, I had a 30-minute call with the hiring manager. The 'Superday' consisted of three rounds: one mixed technical and behavioral, a second fully technical, and a final round that was purely behavioral. The very last step was a meeting with the CEO.

So I started with a recruiter call to see if we were on the same page. Then a phone interview where they gave me a practical coding problem, not like typical leetcode. The final round was a virtual onsite, which was 3 parts: a live coding session, a chat with the hiring manager, and a system design discussion. I split the onsite over two days, doing the coding and manager chat on day one, and system design on day two. The live coding part was practical, but involved multithreading and locks, which was a bit outside my usual stuff, so be ready for that. Practicing leetcode concurrency questions might help. The hiring manager chat was about my past work and team fit stuff. Honestly, I felt like I messed up the live coding, and I was kind of relieved when they cut the process short and rejected me, saving me time. Though I guess some people might find that abrupt.

A practical coding screen with two engineers. Even though I communicated well and solved the problem, they were expecting perfection. You have to perform perfectly right away, and don't expect friendliness to mean you're doing well. You need to have an answer immediately, within a few minutes, which is apparently the standard.