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Adobe interview notes, page 3 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·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Adobe systems design phone screen, pretty deep Linux internals question that honestly felt more like an OS course exam than a typical SWE interview. One question, lots of sub-parts, and I was scrambling to remember things I hadn't touched since college.
  • A script in one terminal continuously writes to log.txt. A second terminal is running `tail -f log.txt`. A third terminal runs `rm log.txt`. Walk through what happens to: the writer's file descriptor and ongoing writes, what the tailer sees, what happens to the directory entry and the inode, and when disk space actually gets reclaimed. Also explain how `lsof | grep deleted` exposes this situation, and touch on the discrepancy you'd see between `df` and `du` after such a delete.

“I knew the broad strokes.”

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Adobe·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Went through a technical phone screen for an ML Engineer role at Adobe that was pretty much entirely focused on numerical precision and mixed precision training. Not a lot of breadth, just one topic drilled pretty deep.
  • Can you walk through the differences between FP16, BF16, and FP32, and explain why mixed precision training speeds things up?
  • Why is BF16 generally preferred over FP16 for training large language models?
  • What are the tradeoffs between a wider exponent range and more mantissa bits in floating point formats?

“This is where I spent most of the interview.”

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Adobe·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2026
Went through a pretty thorough loop at Adobe for an ML Engineer role. It was a mix of behavioral and technical stuff, resume deep-dive included, and they clearly wanted to see how you think about ambiguity and cross-team work, not just model accuracy.
  • Walk me through your resume from start to finish, and highlight two projects you're especially proud of. What were your specific contributions, the technical decisions you made, and what measurable outcomes came out of them?
  • Tell me about a time you had to work through a situation where the requirements or direction were unclear. How did you move forward?
  • Describe a conflict you had with a teammate or stakeholder. How did it play out and what did you do to resolve it?
  • Can you give an example of a time you had to deliver something under a really tight deadline? What trade-offs did you make?
  • Tell me about a failure. What happened and what did you take away from it?
  • Why Adobe specifically, and how do you typically work with marketing teams or other non-technical partners?

“This took way longer than I expected.”

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Adobe·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Adobe PM interview with a single product question about the Mobile Scan app. Pretty focused session, no fluff, just one meaty retention problem to dig into.
  • How would you improve retention for the Adobe Mobile Scan app?

“I jumped straight to feature ideas and had to walk it back when I realized I hadn't segmented users at all.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Adobe SWE interview that went deep on iterator design, specifically building a nested list iterator without pre-flattening. The problem had a lot of moving parts and the complexity analysis comparison at the end felt like a separate mini-interview on its own.
  • Design a lazy iterator over a nested list structure (integers or further lists) that returns integers left-to-right. Implement hasNext() and next() without pre-flattening the input, using O(d) space where d is the max nesting depth.
  • Implement the same nested iterator using a recursive pre-flattening approach, then compare both approaches in time and space complexity.
  • How would you handle edge cases like empty lists, deeply nested empty lists, and integer boundary values in this iterator?

“This took me a while to wrap my head around.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Adobe system design round for a software engineer role. One big question that covered a lot of ground, the kind where you feel like you're doing okay until they ask the fifth follow-up and you realize you were only halfway there.
  • Design a distributed system to compute word frequencies across terabytes of text without using MapReduce. Walk through ingestion, token partitioning across shards, partial and global aggregation, top-K results, fault tolerance, idempotency, delivery semantics, backpressure, node failure recovery, and how results are stored and served.

“This question is basically a full distributed systems exam in one prompt.”

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Adobe·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Adobe ML engineer interview with a graph/BFS problem. Pretty standard coding round, nothing too wild, but the problem has a few gotchas if you're not careful about how you initialize the BFS.
  • Given a binary matrix of M rows and N columns, compute the shortest distance from each cell to the nearest cell containing 0. Return the result as a new matrix of the same dimensions.

“Multi-source BFS is the right move here.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Did a coding round for a Software Engineer role at Adobe and got hit with the binary tree maximum path sum problem. Pretty classic but the solution has a subtle twist that's easy to fumble if you haven't seen it before.
  • Given the root of a binary tree, find the maximum path sum where a path can start and end at any node and does not need to pass through the root.

“The key thing that trips people up here is that you're solving two problems at once.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Adobe system design round for a software engineer role. One massive question that basically covered every layer of the stack, from browser to database. Felt like they were testing whether you could hold a lot of complexity in your head at once rather than go deep on any single piece.
  • Walk through how you would analyze and improve end-to-end latency for a web request that passes through a browser, CDN, load balancer, microservices, caches, databases, and third-party services. Cover how you'd model and decompose the latency, instrument both client and server, attribute delays to frontend vs backend, investigate tail latency outliers, propose optimizations at every layer, and define SLIs/SLOs. Include a concrete numeric example showing baseline and expected improvements.

“This question is basically six questions duct-taped together and I did not pace myself well.”

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Adobe·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Adobe system design round for a software engineer role. The whole session was essentially one big question about a travel recommendation service, but it branched into a lot of sub-topics fast. More depth than I expected for a single question.
  • Design a service that accepts a zip code and a date, then returns travel recommendations by calling a Weather backend (zip code input, max 10 concurrent connections) and an Event backend (date input, max 100 requests per second). How do you enforce those limits?
  • What caching strategy would you use for this service, including TTL design, cache key structure, and how you'd handle cache stampedes?
  • How would you use ConcurrentHashMap for shared state in this service, and what are the trade-offs between optimistic and pessimistic locking here?
  • How would your service gracefully degrade if one of the backend dependencies becomes saturated or unavailable?

“The concurrency cap on Weather tripped me up a bit.”

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