Pinterest Interview Questions

WaterBuffalo - "One of the most challenging situations was joining a new startup to realize that they did not figure out their core product and that customers were dissatisfied and leaving in droves. I worked together with the leaders to understand the core issue and the reasons that the customers were leaving. Then together with the team, we set out to map out those core issues and the gaps that we had in our product. We then worked towards designing a new solution to address those gaps and build an MVP. W"See full answer

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

Michael B. - "Write a function which Caesar ciphers all the strings so that the first character is "a". Use ascii code points and the modulo operator to do this. Use this function to create a hashmap between each string and the CC-a string. Then go through each key:value pair in the hashmap, and use the CC-a ciphered value as the key in a new defaultdict(list), adding the original string to the value field in the output."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

Olasile A. - "How would you decide on ad placement on Pinterest? First I would ask clarifying questions as to the reason why no ads have been placed in the top left section of the page feed. Is this more strategic to Pinterest's mission? Is this by design to lay out the architecture of the page feed this way? In the prompt, it is explained that the company is targeting revenue increase as a goal this quarter. Are there alternatives means to generate more revenue in order not to compromise our values an"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

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