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Coursera interview notes, page 2 of 2

Large Enterprises

Screna has 13 Coursera interview write-ups. The most reported round is the technical phone screen (7).

13 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Coursera·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Coursera backend engineer interview with a voting algorithm problem. Two parts to the same question, one straightforward and one that actually requires thinking through the elimination logic carefully.
  • Given ballots represented as a dictionary mapping ranked candidate tuples to voter counts, implement a popular vote function that returns the candidate with the most first-place votes.
  • Using the same ballot structure, implement a ranked-choice voting algorithm that eliminates the last-place candidate each round and redistributes their votes until someone clears 50%.

“Pretty mechanical once you see it.”

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Coursera·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Coursera software engineer interview with a simulation problem that looks straightforward until you actually try to implement it cleanly. The IRV question had enough edge cases to keep things interesting for a while.
  • Given a list of ranked ballots where each ballot is an ordered list of candidate names, implement Instant Runoff Voting: each round count only the top still-active candidate per ballot, declare a winner if someone exceeds 50% of votes, otherwise eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes (breaking ties by eliminating the lexicographically largest name), and return the final winner.

“My first instinct was to mutate the ballots as candidates got eliminated and I wasted a few minutes going down that path before realizing it was a mess.”

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Coursera·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Coding screen for a software engineer role at Coursera, centered on an election simulation problem. Two parts to the same problem, and the second one had enough edge cases to keep me busy for a while.
  • Given a list of ranked ballots, implement a simple plurality voting system that returns the candidate with the most first-choice votes, breaking ties by lexicographic order.
  • Using the same ballot input, implement instant-runoff voting: repeatedly eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes each round until someone crosses 50%, handling ties by eliminating the lexicographically largest candidate.

“Pretty straightforward once you realize you only look at the first element of each ballot.”

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