Attentive Interview Questions — Page 1

Attentive·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

System design round at Attentive for a software engineering role. The prompt was a catalog service with a lot of moving parts, ingestion pipelines, schema design, admin overrides, the whole thing. Decent challenge if you like backend architecture problems.

Design a catalog service that ingests product data from multiple partner sites in different formats and on different schedules, stores it, and exposes it via an API. Admins should be able to override any partner-supplied attribute, and those overrides need to survive re-ingestion.

“This one sprawled fast.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Attentive software engineer interview that was basically a sliding window deep dive with a bunch of production and scale follow-ups tacked on. More layered than I expected for what started as a straightforward LeetCode problem.

Given an array of positive integers and a target value, find the minimum length of a contiguous subarray whose sum is greater than or equal to the target. Return 0 if no such subarray exists.
The function you just wrote is deployed to production and it's crashing. Walk me through how you'd troubleshoot it.
The input data is coming from S3 and is too large to fit in memory. How would you modify your approach?
Write pseudo-code for a 2D matrix variant of the problem: find the smallest sub-rectangle whose sum is greater than or equal to the target. Also discuss how crash detection would work in this context.

“They had me start with a fixed-sum-of-3 version first which honestly helped me think through edge cases before generalizing.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026

Behavioral round with the hiring manager at Attentive for a Software Engineer role. Three blocks: standard behavioral stories, a deep project dive, and a future goals conversation. The project deep-dive apparently runs long so come prepared to defend every decision you made.

Tell me about a time you had a significant impact on a project or team.
Describe a situation where you dealt with conflict on a team.
Walk me through a project from your resume, including the technical decisions you made and the trade-offs involved.
How did you handle a situation where you had to make decisions without clear requirements or direction?
Tell me about a failure or a project that didn't go as planned.
Where do you want to be in the next one to three years, and how does this role fit into that path?

“Pretty standard opener but I always underestimate how specific they want you to get.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Attentive SWE interview that started as a straightforward coding design problem and then pivoted mid-question into a more complex polling and scheduling design. The interviewer kept layering on follow-ups until it felt less like one question and more like a full system design session crammed into a single problem.

Design and implement a message broadcasting service given a mapping of companies to subscriber lists and a log of messages with timestamps. Send each company's messages to its subscribers.
Extend the polling approach to support a time range [t1, t2] instead of a single current timestamp.
Design the API surface for this service, including broadcast, subscribe, unsubscribe, and schedule operations.
What storage model would you choose for the logs and subscriber lists, and why?
Design a scheduling API that fires future broadcasts at specified times.

“The initial version felt manageable.”

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Attentive·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Got a pretty intense diagnostic case question for a Data Scientist role at Attentive. One question, but it was a beast, covering everything from instrumentation sanity checks to causal inference to experiment design. Not a vibe-check round at all.

Ride volume at a major rideshare platform drops 14% month-over-month and 9% year-over-year after normalizing for days in the month. Walk through how you'd (a) confirm the drop is real and not a data artifact, (b) decompose it into demand-side vs supply-side causes, and (c) quantify the top two root causes. Be specific about metrics, data cuts, statistical methods, and any experiments you'd run to validate your hypothesis.

“This one took me a while to even organize mentally.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Attentive software engineer interview with a system design question centered on building a notification/broadcast system. The problem had a few moving parts and required thinking through scheduling, dedup, and state management on the fly.

Design a notification system that sends broadcast messages to company subscribers based on scheduled times. You're given a company-to-subscriber mapping and a list of broadcast logs with scheduling and delivery status info. Implement logic for two modes: one that takes a single current time and sends all overdue unprocessed broadcasts, and one that takes a time window and sends broadcasts scheduled within that range. Also explain how you'd prevent duplicate sends and track delivery state.

“The core question isn't hard to grasp but the details pile up fast.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Coding round at Attentive for a software engineer role. One algorithmic problem, started with a constrained version then had to generalize it, which is a format I wasn't fully expecting.

Given a string and an integer k, repeatedly remove contiguous groups of exactly k identical characters, concatenating the remaining parts after each removal until no more removals are possible. Return the final string. Start by solving the case where k is fixed at 3, then generalize your solution to any k.

“The warm-up framing threw me a bit.”

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Attentive·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Attentive for a software engineer role, focused entirely on building a broadcast messaging service. Pretty deep dive, they pushed hard on the scheduling and delivery reliability parts.

Design a broadcast messaging service that lets companies schedule messages to all their subscribers at a future time, with support for querying by time range and guaranteed eventual delivery.
What does the storage schema look like for companies, subscribers, scheduled broadcasts, and delivery state?
Walk me through how the scheduler determines which broadcasts are ready to be sent.
Is a simple polling model acceptable for the scheduler, and how would you improve it at larger scale?
How do you handle idempotency, retries, duplicate prevention, and failures in the delivery pipeline?
Should the recipient list be evaluated at schedule time or at the time the message is actually sent?

“Big open-ended one to kick things off.”

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Attentive·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Attentive and got hit with a stats-heavy A/B testing question that required knowing your multiple comparisons theory cold. Not a casual conversation.

A new messaging feature is A/B tested across 30 companies independently, each with a 50/50 split and a significance threshold of 0.05. You see 2 significant positive results, 1 significant negative result, and the rest are not significant. What do you conclude, and how do you handle the multiple testing problem before deciding to roll out the feature?

“This one stung a bit because I jumped straight to 'two uplifts, feature works' before catching myself.”

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Attentive·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

A stats-heavy question from what seemed like a technical screen for a DS role at Attentive. The whole thing centered on one scenario about multiple testing across 30 brands, which sounds manageable until you're actually in it.

A company runs an A/B test on a new message-sending method across 30 independent brands, each with a 50/50 control/test split at α = 0.05. Two brands show a significant lift, one shows a significant drop, and the other 27 show nothing. What conclusions can you draw, and how do you handle the multiple testing problem here?

“My first instinct was to say 'two out of thirty is actually pretty good' and I almost stopped there, which would've been embarrassing.”

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