Pixar Animation Studios Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Applied online and heard back from a Pixar recruiter two weeks later. She set up an interview for another two weeks later, which lasted 30 mins with 2 s/w engineers from the team. They asked basic C++ questions and one basic graphics question. There was also one behavioral question asked. I felt I answered everything well, but two days later, I got an email saying they're moving forward with other candidates. I don't feel like I got a fair shot; they barely interviewed me and didn't even ask about my projects or my interest in Pixar/the position. Maybe they already had other candidates in mind. It was disappointing, though the interviewers were friendly.

Started with a recruiter phone screen, then had an hour-long phone interview with two engineering leads. After that, there were two on-site visits, each with 4-5 half-hour sessions. These sessions included people from different teams like engineers, QA, project management, and the VP of software. Some of the interviews were conversational, others involved whiteboard coding problems and puzzles. They asked specific C++ and multi-threading questions, as well as questions about figuring out algorithms. They also asked about my previous work, responsibilities, and how I tackled projects. All the interviewers were nice, and I felt comfortable asking questions, even learned some stuff. The software department is a couple of blocks away from the main fancy buildings, and it felt a bit separate from the rest of the company. I got the impression the job might be pretty specialized with not a lot of variety. The campus is reachable by public transport, but it's not super convenient.

Applied online and got an email to set up a phone interview pretty quickly. They scheduled it for Friday morning after I got the email Wednesday. It was a 20-minute interview with two people. They got back to me about 2-3 weeks later to say they were moving on with other candidates.