Tesla Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 363 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Tesla.
Tesla
Software Engineer
Intern Average Positive experience Accept offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding System Design
I applied through the Tesla careers website and then got invited to two interview rounds. Both were technical interviews. The first one was a typical tech interview, where they first asked about my resume for the first half and then gave me a LeetCode-style question. The second interview was more focused on system design. It started with a simple coding problem, and after I finished, they asked how I could improve the code.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Can you tell me about your most recent experience?
- What was your team like during your last experience?
Tesla
Software Engineer Intern
Intern Average Negative experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen
Interview formats
Other
Recruiter reached out to me with some questions for the team. I answered them and sent them back within an hour, and then they took 2 weeks to respond just to reject me... I asked around on discord and found 2 other people who got rejected for the role after getting the same email. What company rejects candidates that often just off a screening email? At least have the decency to get back to me fast, and not waste my time for 2 weeks straight while I’m preparing for the interview.
Confirmed questions1 question
- What is your expected graduation date? Can you work full-time (40 hours/week)? This one is required. What is the earliest date you can start? Until what date would you be available to work? (our internships need at least 12 weeks) Can you intern for two or more seasons in a row (like Summer 2026 - Fall 2026)? Can you work on-site in Palo Alto, CA? This one is required. Do you have any upcoming deadlines or other offers we should know about? Have you applied for or interviewed for a Tesla internship before, and if yes, which team or recruiter was it with? What’s a good phone number to reach you at? (if it’s international please say so) Will you need immigration sponsorship now or in the future? What is your availability in Pacific time for the next 2 weeks for a possible interview? Please list all dates and times for the next 2 weeks so we can match it with the team’s schedule.
Tesla
Software Engineer
Senior Average Negative experience No offer 4 rounds About a month
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen Onsite Presentation
Interview formats
Behavioral Technical Coding Presentation
Started with a few recruiter calls and interview rounds with the hiring manager. Discussed my projects and the team and everything seemed to go well. For the onsite, they ask for a 30 minute presentation on a topic of your choice. During the onsite, it is very clear that it is a very in-group environment where they like to hire people similar to themselves. The coding and questions were not super hard, but it was obvious they want to work with like-minded people. It is their choice, but this ends up wasting everyones time. I didn’t believe the bad reputation of Tesla, but I ended up being proven wrong.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Why do you want to work at Tesla?
Tesla Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Tesla interview reports.
“Write an implementation of the atoi function in C (atoi is a C function which converts an ascii string to its integer value and returns it, for e.g "123" -> 123, "123a" -> 123, "a123" -> 0).”
Read reports →“Write a function that determines if a given string is a palindrome. A palindrome is a word, phrase, or character sequence that reads the same forward and backward. Ignore spaces, punctuation, and letter case.”
Read reports →“Given a polynomial function with n terms and k degrees, figure out how many partial derivatives you can make”
Read reports →“Given a phone number, write code/algorithm to output all possible alphabetic codes that map to it.”
Read reports →“what happens after you type a link into the browser search bar and press 'enter'?”
Read report →“Implement a basic data structure like a heap in golang. Navigate islands to find some goal”
Read report →“How can you check if there’s a cycle in a singly linked list, preferably using constant space?”
Read report →“Implement a function that computes the angle between the minute and hour hands on an analog clock.”
Read report →“implement a command-line program that can evaluate a list of equations. For example: a=b+4 b=c+d d=4 c=3+2”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 363 Tesla interview reports.