This has to be one of the worst interviews ever, the interviewer was interviewing me sitting on a sofa in a common area and it was just loud and distracting. Because he was sitting on the sofa, his laptop was on his lap and only the bottom left half of his face in in the camera entire time.
He started the interview by shooting about 20 simple knowledge based questions at me then proceeded to ask about my experiences.
When I think it couldn't be any worse, when I asked him a simple question on how the company culture was. He couldn't answer it, instead asked me what I looked for in culture and proceeded to respond "Yes, we have all those" I stopped asking question and finished the interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Knowledge questions,
Simple programming questions + follow ups: reverse a word, reverse a string, reverse words in a string
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at PayPal
Interview
A call with manager followed by 2 45 min interviews. One was a typical leetcode question and the other was a system design question. The system design for me was pretty difficult since I am not used to it but the leetcode interview was easy, The system design interview varies for some. Some people got a simple OOP system design question but I got a real system design question where I had to design a feature.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If you had to scale your personal project, how would you do it?
I applied online. I interviewed at PayPal (San Jose, CA) in Apr 2026
Interview
OA -> 15min recruiter screen -> 2x 45 min tech rounds (one LC/algorithmic/DSA, one system design/behavioral engineering manager). Super chill, didn't expect to hear back in less than a week. First tech was on Hackerrank with an engineer, try to get 15/15 test cases passed and communicate your thought process. Second tech was a resume grill (really know those bullet points) and a simple verbal system design.