Zillow Software Engineer interview questions

Applied through campus career fair and received a online coding challenge email a week later. All my friends who applied all seem to received this challenge though. The online coding challenge has two questions: one easy question and one medium question. Be very careful about edge cases and programming style (maintainable, redundancy etc.) as this seems to be what is looked for. Then recruiter contacted me a few days after I completed the challenge informing me that I was in the second cut and will schedule a phone screen interview two weeks later. The phone screen lasts 45-60 (60 minutes for me). A project manager asks about project experience first, then again two technical questions. This time one medium and one hard question (based on Leetcode.com difficulty ranking). Programming takes place on an online editor in HackerRank.com like the coding challenge. You won’t be able to test your code so be careful with syntax and do explain how your code works by working through small sample cases. I didn’t solve the hard one but articulated my thoughts clearly and had some good ideas about it. In the end the manager saved some time for me to ask questions and also asked typical questions like ‘why Zillow’. I did my research and prepared for these. Side note: be sure to asks questions to clarify specifications in technical questions when it’s ambiguous, as this is part of the question as well. A few days later recruiter contacted me saying I moved forward and would like to schedule an onsite. I postponed the onsite till next year as there’s vacation in between. I interviewed onsite early next year. Every interviewee will have to sign an NDA I suppose. The interview composed of 3 back-to-back one hour long interviews with three senior engineers from three different teams at Zillow. Same process for all 3 interviews: first interviewer asks parts he’s interested about your resume; then the technical question(s); finally some time for you to ask interviewer questions. Some interviewers ask an easy question at first. For these situations, manage your time wisely to allocate enough time for the hard one. My major onsite questions are all of hard difficulty. As always, go through general idea first, write clean code, and work through small sample cases. I didn’t solved all but solved majority. The whole onsite was very pleasant. Please prepare for basic data structures and related algorithms. And do practice (a lot of) other techniques, especially dynamic programming. An exciting offer came shortly afterwards and I accepted it. The whole process is very nice and reflects Zillow’s enormous momentum and vibe as a rapidly growing company. I appreciate that my recruiter was very responsive during the whole time.

It takes about 3 weeks in total. First contacted by HR through linkedin, then followed by a phone interview and an onsite interview. The onsite interview had 4 rounds of 1:1 and lunch. Most interviewers are nice and didn't ask hard questions.