Pony.ai Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

So first off, they do a standard phone interview/screening. Then there's an hour-long technical interview that includes a Leetcode-style question. After that, it's a 4-hour long onsite where they check for behavior/cultural fit and ask a systems architecture question. They really want to know how you'd design a system from scratch and how you'd tackle problems.

The interview process started with a phone screen where the interviewer was 20 minutes late. We discussed my past work, and then I was asked to code quicksort. A week later, I was invited for an onsite interview. This consisted of 5 standard interviews: 4 technical whiteboarding sessions and 1 HR interview. The interviews were very CS/coding heavy, focusing on data structures and algorithms. I wasn't fully prepared, so I didn't perform well. Overall, I wasn't too impressed with the people at Pony.AI. Some interviewers were quite rude, entering the room without introducing themselves and immediately firing off questions. They were also unhelpful or hostile when I asked questions. I sometimes repeat questions to different people to check consistency, and one interviewer flatly refused to disclose trivial information that a previous interviewer had readily shared. From my limited interactions, it seems to have a strong Chinese company culture, and I'm unsure what it would be like to work there. I was pretty indifferent when I received the rejection email.

I had 4 interviews: a phone interview, a coding interview, a system interview, and a leader interview. The phone interview was a basic check on my coding skills and past projects. The coding interview involved solving a few LeetCode problems. The system interview covered topics like math, programming languages, and computer and network fundamentals. Finally, the leader interview was more of a conversational discussion.