Pinterest interview questions

Design a notification system

Async processing with durable queues, per-channel isolation, retries/DLQ, at-least-once + idempotency, outbox, priorities.

Companies: Pinterest, Airbnb, Amazon, Autodesk +24

async-processing · idempotency · outbox-pattern · queues

Last reported Oct 2026

Put Boxes Into the Warehouse I

Given arrays of box heights and warehouse room heights, maximize how many boxes can be placed knowing a box can only reach a room if…

Companies: Pinterest

Array · Greedy · Sorting

Last reported Oct 2026

Put Boxes Into the Warehouse II

Given box sizes and a sequence of warehouse slot heights, maximize how many boxes can be placed into the slots under the constraint that a…

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Oct 2026

Design a Typeahead Service on an In-Memory Trie, Then Scale It Without New Services

Companies: Pinterest

System Design

Last reported Sep 2026

Bus Routes

Given repeating bus routes and start/target stops, find the minimum number of bus rides required to go from source to target (or -1 if impossible)…

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Bloomberg, Coupang +3

Array · Breadth-First Search · Hash Table

Last reported Sep 2026

Reconstruct Itinerary

Given a list of directed flight tickets, reconstruct an itinerary starting at "JFK" that uses every ticket exactly once and, among all valid itineraries, returns…

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Anduril, Google

Array · Depth-First Search · Eulerian Circuit · Eulerian Path

Last reported Sep 2026

Design a Merchant Catalog Update Pipeline with Bulk Files and Image Resizing

Companies: Pinterest

System Design · System Design Fundamentals

Last reported Sep 2026

Design Real-Time Search Autocomplete with Top-10 Popularity-Ranked Prefix Suggestions

Companies: Pinterest

System Design

Last reported Sep 2026

Design a distributed rate limiter

Algorithm trade-offs (fixed window, sliding log, sliding counter, token bucket), placement, distributed atomic counting, failure modes.

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple +14

api-gateway · atomicity · Concurrency · Consistency & Availability

Last reported Sep 2026

Design a Large-File Upload and Analysis Flow

Companies: Pinterest

System Design

Last reported Sep 2026

Distribute Money as Evenly as Possible

Given a total amount of money and a number of people, distribute the money as evenly as possible among all people. Minimize the difference between…

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Sep 2026

Minimize Longest Daily Hike Duration

Given a route with N possible overnight stops and their cumulative travel times, determine the optimal placement of K overnight stops to minimize the longest…

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Sep 2026

Ransom Note

Determine whether ransomNote can be formed from magazine by verifying that for every character, magazine contains at least as many occurrences as needed — i.e.…

Companies: Pinterest, Anduril

Counting · Hash Table · String

Last reported Sep 2026

Round to X Significant Digits with Thousand Separators

Given a numeric string S and an integer X, return a string representation of S rounded to X significant digits, with thousand separators applied where…

Companies: Pinterest, Google

Last reported Aug 2026

Design Pinterest's Home Feed

Design the personalized home feed for Pinterest, a visual discovery platform where users see recommended and followed content (pins) based on their interests, boards, and…

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Aug 2026

Combination Sum II

Given a multiset of candidate numbers, return all unique combinations that sum to the target where each candidate may be used at most once. This…

Companies: Pinterest, Expedia, LinkedIn, Meta +1

Last reported Aug 2026

Pacific Atlantic Water Flow

Given an m×n height grid where water can flow from a cell to any neighbor of lesser-or-equal height, return all coordinates from which water can…

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Merge, Meta

Last reported Aug 2026

The Skyline Problem

Given a list of rectangular buildings [left, right, height], compute the skyline as the sequence of key points where the maximum building height changes across…

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, General Motors

Last reported Aug 2026

Implement getElevator() and nextFloor() for a multi-elevator system

Given a list of elevators, each with a current floor and direction, implement two methods: getElevator(userFloor, destinationFloor) that selects the best elevator to serve a…

Companies: Pinterest

Last reported Aug 2026

Shortest Way to Form String

Given a source and target string, return the minimum number of subsequences of source that need to be concatenated to form target (or -1 if…

Companies: Pinterest

Binary Search · Greedy · String · Two Pointers

Last reported Aug 2026

Give me an example of a time when you were able to deliver an important project under a tight deadline.

Companies: Pinterest, Amazon, Capital One, Microsoft +2

Last reported Jul 2026

Design User and Item Embeddings from Long Histories

Companies: Pinterest

ML System Design

Last reported Jul 2026