← Back to Directory

Carvana

Large Enterprises

Carvana is an online used-car retailer that enables customers to buy, sell, and finance vehicles entirely online, offering home delivery and its signature car vending machines. It is known for disrupting the traditional dealership model with an e-commerce approach to automotive sales.

6 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Carvana·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Did a technical phone screen for a backend role at Carvana and got a number-to-English conversion problem. Managed to code up the under-1000 case but kind of stalled out when it came to the larger numbers and just talked through the rest.
  • Given an integer, write a function that converts it to its English words representation (e.g. 1234 becomes "One Thousand Two Hundred Thirty Four").

“Got the sub-1000 logic coded up fine, chunks of hundreds, tens, ones, no problem.”

View Post

Carvana·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Carvana software engineer interview with a classic number-to-words coding problem. Not the hardest problem out there but the edge cases pile up fast and I underestimated how much bookkeeping was involved.
  • Given a nonnegative integer up to 2,147,483,647, write a function that returns its English words representation (e.g. 1234567 becomes 'One Million Two Hundred Thirty Four Thousand Five Hundred Sixty Seven').

“Looked straightforward and then I started coding and realized I had no clean way to handle the thousands/millions/billions groupings without repeating myself.”

View Post

Carvana·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Carvana for a software engineering role. The whole thing was one big question about an employee attendance backend, and they really wanted to dig into every layer of it.
  • Design the backend service for an employee attendance system that handles clock-in/clock-out, pay period calculations, wage-based pay computation, high traffic at peak times, and syncing data from an external system. Walk through APIs, data model, architecture, consistency, failure handling, and scalability.

“This is a lot of surface area for one question.”

View Post

Carvana·Backend Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Carvana for a backend engineer role. The team apparently only had junior openings, which nobody mentioned upfront, so after the interview they told me I was overqualified and shuffled me over to the inventory team instead.
  • How do you use AI tools in your day-to-day work?

“Pretty standard topic these days but I rambled a bit trying to cover too many angles at once.”

View Post

Carvana·Backend Engineer·Onsite - Cross-functional / Panel

Apr 2026
Had a 30-minute chat-style round with a PM at Carvana for a backend role. Pretty conversational, no coding, just soft skills and communication stuff.
  • How would you handle a conflict with a product manager?
  • How would you explain a technical concept to a non-technical PM?

“I went with a situation-action-result structure and talked about a time I disagreed on scope.”

View Post