Pinterest Interview Questions

Kartikeya N. - "C : Okay. So I would want to start with knowing what is the product for which we have to build a recommendation system. I : This is a photo sharing product. C : Okay. So is this something on the lines of Instagram? I : Yes C : Okay. And are we a new product co or we have some current product built already? I : You can assume yourself. C : Okay. Is there any demography or country we are targeting? I : No, this is a global product C : Okay. So, the biggest goal of any product recommendation system"See full answer

Ashish G. - "Rate Limiter is to limit the number of request from a particular IP Address. Rate limiter will block the IP address to reduce the load on server. It should be highly available and handle concurrent requests. Blocked IP addresses should be kept in a pool which is present in shared cache. We need to keep threshold value after it reaches threshold value it should start blocking IP address. All these ip address to be kept in No SQL DB. Batch will run that will clear the cache and delete all the bloc"See full answer

Aymen D. - "It would have been more interesting to focus on the system design rather than the Trie DS, Interviewee could have just mentioned the Trie and passed to things more important. Interviewee should have focused on the factors on which he wants to scale the API servers, popularity of the query parts ? region may be ? A hash of many factors ? Caches should have definitely be discussed, Cache eviction policies, Cache invalidation managements... Interviewee should have mentioned which kind of API pro"See full answer

Dinar M. - "Even more faster and vectorized version, using np.linalg.norm - to avoid loop and np.argpartition to select lowest k. We dont need to sort whole array - we need to be sure that first k elements are lower than the rest. import numpy as np def knn(Xtrain, ytrain, X_new, k): distances = np.linalg.norm(Xtrain - Xnew, axis=1) k_indices = np.argpartition(distances, k)[:k] # O(N) selection instead of O(N log N) sort return int(np.sum(ytrain[kindices]) > k / 2.0) `"See full answer

Scarlett S. - "(This is debugging, then trade off question) WAU and email open rates can be influencing each other, especially an email opened and then clicked could lead to an active user, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they have correlations or be the only reason causing changes. The approach So we definitely need to look at each cause of Why MAU goes up, and why email notification open rates go down, then develop some hypothesis on for proper cause, I'd love to gather some info to narr"See full answer

Arnab S. - "clarifying questions why are we building this? is there a particular reason we are building this or is there a metric/group of metrics that shall be activated that eventually drives an organisational metric or is it just an attempt of creating another super app? am i safe to assume that i am a part of the team that can actually drive the marketplace experience? and by shopping, we mean a marketplace like an amazon? can i safely set the overarching organisational goal, then the indi"See full answer

Niaz - "Assumption about the teleportation machine: Teleportation is instantaneous like Star Trek The product does not take too much space maybe 6 ft by 6 ft and 10ft high is good enough Teleportation works vertically both above ground and underground as well as going 100 meters horizontally If possible you can combine multiple teleportation machine to repeat teleportation Users groups A product like this can be leveraged for almost everyone but I think I want to focus on users who ha"See full answer

Michelle D. - "I'd first start with confirming my understanding with the interviewer of Spotify's key metric overall. For this exercise, my working assumption of Spotify's north star is time spent listening (TSL, for short), which can be measured daily, weekly, and monthly. As the PM for Discover Weekly, I want to improve Discover Weekly such that I positively impact TSL. As such, my goal is to increase minutes spent listening to Discover Weekly playlists. The primary metric I will want to track is minutes s"See full answer

Michelle D. - "I would first want to confirm my understanding of the reasoning behind no-ads-allowed in the top left of the feed. For this case, I will assume that the rule is not a hard rule and one in which we may test in this prompt. I'd next confirm my understanding of Pinterest's revenue model with the interviewer. My understanding is as follows: Pinterest serves ads to pinners. Conversion (i.e., purchase) via the ad yields some amount of profit to Pinterest. There's some amount of costs associated and"See full answer

Exponent - "This is a pretty straightforward Improve a Product question. Let's first go over the Improve a Product formula: Ask clarifying questions Identify users, behaviors, and pain points State product goal Brainstorm small improvements Brainstorm bolder improvements Measure success Summarize Now, let's begin! Ask clarifying questions Before we begin listing off recommendations, it's important you ask questions to ensure you and the interviewe"See full answer

Hl M. - "Clarifying Slack is a mature product in markets with millions of users B2B platform Expand customer base to school boards SWOT Technology is mature and well reputed Good privacy practices Threats Google school Microsoft learning education Zoom Journeys User Users for slack - for - school School boards 12 school boards Primary Secondary High Universities - Remote learning / Distant educations - Incumbents MooCs - Existing platform End Users: Students Teachers Administrators Ed"See full answer

Aiden L. - "clarification define a handyman: someone who's paid to do minor renovations or domestic repairs. define the app: standalone or within facebook or meta's app family? why are we designing this? should I come up with a goal (engagement, monetization)? constraints (financials/timeline)? goal: adoption. since it's a new app, i want ppl to adopt first and then monetize the users. I'd define a handyman as someone who's paid by app users to do minor fixes, such as unc"See full answer

William M. - "Relu = 0 if > some threshold else x sigmoid normalizes to 0-1 asymptotically"See full answer

Anonymous Dove - "People interested in travel on Pinterest are looking for inspiration, information, and interaction. They want to discover new places, learn useful tips, and connect with other travelers. To improve their experience, I would suggest the following ideas: Create curated collections of travel pins: Pinterest users love to browse and save pins that match their interests and preferences. By creating curated collections of travel pins, you can showcase the best content from different sources and"See full answer