Upstart interview questions

Maximum Subarray

Find the contiguous subarray within an integer array that yields the maximum possible sum and return that sum. This is typically solved in O(n) with…

Companies: Upstart, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn +5

Array · Divide and Conquer · Dynamic Programming

Last reported Sep 2026

Implement a Polling System

Design and implement a full-stack polling system that allows users to create polls and share unique links. Voters should only be able to cast a…

Companies: Upstart

Last reported Aug 2026

Describe a complex problem you faced and how you solved it

Companies: Upstart, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Yelp

Last reported Jul 2026

Design a User Sign Up API

Design a user sign up API for a SaaS product that allows users to register accounts, validate their information, and gain access to the platform.

Companies: Upstart

Last reported May 2026

Tell me about a time when a staff engineer strongly disagreed with your approach and their resistance was preventing the project from moving forward, and how you handled it.

Tell me about a time when a staff engineer strongly disagreed with your approach and their resistance was preventing the project from moving forward, and…

Companies: Upstart

Last reported May 2026

Design a Basic Auth System

Design a scalable authentication system that can handle user registration, login, session management, and secure access control across multiple services.

Companies: Upstart, Airbnb, PayPal

Last reported Apr 2026

Group Anagrams

Group the input strings into lists of anagrams — i.e., strings that contain the same multiset of letters — and return the groups in any…

Companies: Upstart, Amazon, Apple, Arize Ai +14

Array · Hash Table · Sorting · String

Last reported Apr 2026

Minimum Area Rectangle

Given up to 500 unique 2D points, find the smallest area of an axis-aligned rectangle whose four corners are among the points. The core challenge…

Companies: Upstart

Last reported Apr 2026

Two Sum

Given an array of integers and a target, return the indices of two distinct elements whose values sum to the target (exactly one valid solution…

Companies: Upstart, Amazon, Apple, Bloomberg +13

Array · Hash Table

Last reported Apr 2026

Describe experience working on a complex project

Companies: Upstart, Amazon, Arize Ai, Block +12

Last reported Feb 2026

Maximum Absolute Sum of Any Subarray

Find the maximum absolute sum of any contiguous subarray (possibly empty) in an integer array — i.e., the maximum of the largest subarray sum and…

Companies: Upstart

Last reported Feb 2026

Tell me about a time when you had disagreements with your colleagues

Companies: Upstart, Amazon, Anthropic, Meta +2

Last reported Feb 2026

Add Drama to String

Transform a string by adding one exclamation mark to every group of consecutive exclamation marks and converting all periods to exclamation marks.

Companies: Upstart

Last reported Jan 2026

Decode Scrambled Words Using Dictionary

Given a dictionary of valid words and scrambled words where only the middle letters are rearranged (first and last letters remain in place), decode each…

Companies: Upstart

Last reported Jan 2026

Design a polling system

Design a polling system that allows users to create polls with multiple options, vote on existing polls, and view real-time voting results.

Companies: Upstart, Figma

Last reported Dec 2025

Address Missing Income Bracket in California Housing Data

Companies: Upstart

Feature Engineering · Supervised Learning

Derive logistic regression objective and gradients

Companies: Upstart

ML Fundamentals · Supervised Learning

Design a Real-Time Personalized Ad Selection System

Companies: Upstart

CTR Prediction & Ads ML · ML System Design

Design a Regression Model for Robust Extrapolation Performance

Companies: Upstart

Model Evaluation · Regression & Statistical Modeling

Design Push-Notification System for Airport Surge Pricing

Companies: Upstart

Feature Engineering · Ranking Models

Explain L1 vs L2 and ridge vs lasso

Companies: Upstart

ML Fundamentals · Regression & Statistical Modeling

How to Architect a Personalized Ads Serving System

Companies: Upstart

CTR Prediction & Ads ML · ML Data Pipelines & Feature Stores