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Adobe interview notes, page 1 of 6

Large Enterprises

Most of these Adobe write-ups come from Software Engineers (30), then Machine Learning Engineers (15) and Product Managers (8). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (32), the system design round (8), the product sense round (7) and the multi-round onsite (4).

58 interview notes · updated Sep 2026

Adobe·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2023
Technical screen for a Data Scientist role at Adobe covering basic SQL on app event data and a handful of Python one-liners. Nothing too wild, felt more like a warm-up round than a real filter.
  • Write a SQL query to count the number of distinct daily active users.
  • Write a SQL query to return the three most common event types from yesterday.
  • Write a SQL query to list all users whose first recorded event was an install.
  • Given a dictionary in Python, write code to invert it so that values become keys and keys become values.
  • Remove duplicates from a Python list in a single line of code.
  • Reverse a string in Python using a single line of code.

“Pretty bread and butter.”

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Adobe·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026
Adobe PM interview, just one question about building a three-year product roadmap. Short and a bit anticlimactic honestly, but the question itself had some depth to it.
  • If you were stepping in as head of product, how would you build out a three-year roadmap?

“I went straight into prioritization frameworks and near-term vs long-term bets, but looking back I think I skipped over the discovery phase too fast.”

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Adobe·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Adobe ML engineer interview that went deep on attention mechanisms. The whole session felt like a graduate seminar on transformer efficiency, which I was not fully prepared for.
  • Walk me through how FlashAttention works under the hood, including how it uses tiling and SRAM to avoid materializing the full attention matrix in HBM.
  • What is online softmax and why does FlashAttention depend on it?
  • Compare multi-query attention, grouped-query attention, and standard multi-head attention. What are the tradeoffs?
  • What is paged attention and what problem does it solve in inference serving?
  • What are the tradeoffs between sparse attention patterns and linear attention approximations?
  • How does quantizing the KV cache affect memory usage and what precision tradeoffs should you consider?

“This is where I felt most exposed.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Adobe SWE interview that leaned heavily on operational depth. Three big behavioral questions back to back, all requiring real stories about complexity, incidents, and process discipline. Not the vibe I expected going in.
  • Walk me through the most complex project you've worked on. What made it complex, what problems came up, and how did you get through them?
  • Describe the most urgent on-call incident you've personally handled. How did you triage it, limit the damage, keep people informed, and close it out afterward?
  • Share an experience that shows you can thrive in a role where operational excellence is a core expectation.

“I had a story ready but I fumbled the 'what made it complex' part.”

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Adobe·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Adobe ML Engineer technical screen, pretty much a single deep-dive question on data leakage. The interviewer clearly wanted more than a textbook definition and pushed for concrete examples across multiple leakage types plus mitigation strategies. Not an easy one to wing.
  • What is data leakage in machine learning? Walk through specific forms of it (like target leakage, train/test contamination, time-based leakage, and leakage introduced during preprocessing), and explain how you'd detect and prevent each one in practice.

“This question is deceptively wide.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Adobe frontend engineer interview with a graph-based coding problem. Pretty classic cycle detection framing but dressed up as a package manager scenario, which I actually thought was a nice touch compared to the usual 'detect cycle in a directed graph' prompt.
  • You're building a package manager where package A depends on package B, meaning B must be installed first. Write a function that determines whether all packages can be installed (i.e., no circular dependencies exist).

“Took me a second to realize this was just cycle detection in a directed graph with extra packaging.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Adobe SWE interview that came down to a single Fibonacci numbers problem. Not much to say, it was a quick coding screen and that was basically it.
  • Implement a function to compute Fibonacci numbers.

“Pretty standard stuff.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Adobe SWE interview with a graph-based algorithmic problem. Pretty standard topological sort territory but they pushed hard on the details around cycle detection and handling ambiguity in output.
  • Given n tasks labeled 0 through n-1 and a list of prerequisite pairs where (a, b) means b must be completed before a, find a valid ordering to complete all tasks. If a cycle exists in the dependencies, report that it's impossible. Walk through your algorithm, data structures, time and space complexity, how you detect cycles, and how you handle cases where multiple valid orderings exist.

“This is basically topological sort dressed up as a scheduling problem.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Adobe system design round for a software engineering role. One question, but it was a beast. Spent the whole session on a single distributed ID generation problem and it kept branching into more sub-problems than I expected.
  • Design an API that returns a unique random integer from a range of 1 to 33 trillion, never repeating a value, at 300,000 requests per second. Walk through how you'd track issued numbers at scale, partition the keyspace across nodes, guarantee exactly-once issuance with durability, handle leader election, and then explain how you'd extend the design if the keyspace doubled.

“I started with a bitmap and immediately got pushback on memory.”

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Adobe·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026
Adobe PM interview with a product metrics question framed around Instagram Reels. One question, product sense heavy, and it pushed harder on measurement than I expected.
  • You're a PM at Instagram responsible for the Reels feature. How would you define and measure its success?

“I jumped straight to engagement metrics and kind of rambled for a bit before realizing I hadn't actually defined what success means for Reels in the first place.”

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