Agoda·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Jun 2026
Had a software engineering interview at Agoda with two pretty different questions back to back. One was a classic DP problem, the other was a probability/simulation question that threw me a bit. Nothing about the experience felt particularly warm or cold, just technical.
- Given a triangular array where each row has one more element than the last, find the minimum path sum from the top to the bottom. At each step you can move to the element directly below or one position to the right in the next row.
- You have a 5-sided die and a 6-sided die. Each round you roll both. The process stops when at least one die shows 1. If only the 5-sided die shows 1 it wins, if only the 6-sided shows 1 it wins, and if both show 1 it's a tie. Find the probability that the 5-sided die wins, the expected number of rounds until stopping, and implement a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate both.
“Classic DP, and I knew it was DP pretty fast.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Agoda, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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