Grammarly

Mid-sized

Most of these Grammarly write-ups come from Software Engineers (39), then Product Managers (3). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (17), the system design round (16), the behavioral / leadership round (3) and the product sense round (2).

42 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Grammarly·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Grammarly for a software engineer role. The whole thing was a single deep problem: build an AI chat layer on top of a spreadsheet product. Lots of ground to cover and the discussion kept branching into areas I hadn't fully thought through.

Design an AI chat interface for a spreadsheet product that translates natural-language commands into structured spreadsheet operations via a tool-calling layer.
How would you handle ambiguous user commands and design a confirmation flow before applying changes to the spreadsheet?
What are the main prompt injection and safety risks in this system, and how would you mitigate them?
How would you approach authorization and permission validation before executing spreadsheet operations triggered by the AI?
How would you think about latency, cost, and scaling for this AI-powered spreadsheet assistant?

“This is a big one.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Grammarly for a software engineer role. The whole thing was a deep dive into building a collaborative spreadsheet product from scratch, think Google Sheets but you have to justify every decision out loud.

Design an online spreadsheet service where multiple users can edit the same workbook simultaneously in real time.
How would you design the data model for workbooks, sheets, cells, and revision history?
Walk through your API design for opening a session, fetching a sheet, submitting edits, subscribing to live updates, and catching up after a reconnect.
How do you handle conflict resolution when two users edit the same cell or insert rows and columns at the same time?
How would you handle persistence, snapshots, and recovery if a server crashes mid-session?
How would you approach formula recalculation when a cell that other cells depend on gets updated?
How would you scale this system and keep latency low for users across different regions?

“This is a beast of a question.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Grammarly for a software engineer role. The whole thing was one big question about building a real-time collaborative editor, Figma-style. Dense problem with a lot of moving parts.

Design the backend and key client interactions for a real-time collaborative design editor, similar to Figma, supporting concurrent edits, presence, and persistence across network failures.

“This one ate up the entire session.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Director-level behavioral round at Grammarly where you're expected to walk through two of your past projects in serious depth. Not a casual chat, they want specifics on what you built, why, and what it actually changed.

Walk me through one of your significant projects end-to-end, including the problem you were solving, your approach, your specific role, and the outcome.
Why did you make the key decisions you made during this project, and what alternatives did you consider?
What was the measurable impact of the project, and how did you know it was successful?

“The part that got me was 'your specific role.' I kept sliding into 'we did this, we decided that' and the interviewer kept pulling me back.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Grammarly SWE interview, technical phone screen focused on data structures. One question, pretty clean problem but the optimal path requires you to actually know binary search cold.

Design a time-based key-value store that supports storing multiple values per key at different timestamps, and retrieving the most recent value at or before a given timestamp.

“I got a working solution going with a linear scan first, which they accepted but you could tell they wanted more.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Grammarly software engineer interview, got a linked list problem that I thought I knew cold but the follow-up tripped me up a bit.

Given the head of a singly linked list, detect whether it contains a cycle in O(n) time and O(1) space. Follow-up: if a cycle exists, find the exact node where it begins.

“The basic cycle detection part went fine, slow and fast pointer, they meet inside the cycle and you return true.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Grammarly SWE interview that had a twist on a classic tree problem. Instead of just solving it, you had to build the tree first from serialized input, which added a layer I wasn't fully expecting.

You're given a serialized sequence of numbers representing a binary tree (level-order with nulls, or similar). Build the tree from that input, then compute its maximum depth.

“I knew the depth part cold, that's just a standard recursion problem.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Grammarly SWE interview with a coding round focused on building a transactional key-value store from scratch. Not the hardest problem conceptually, but the details pile up fast and I underestimated how much the nested transaction bookkeeping would slow me down.

Design and implement an in-memory key-value store that supports set, delete, and count operations, along with nested transactions using begin, commit, and rollback.

“I got the basic set/delete/count part down quickly.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a software engineer role at Grammarly and got a binary search question, which sounds easy until you're actually in the room second-guessing your index math.

Given a sorted integer array and a target value, return the index of the target if it exists, otherwise return -1. Then discuss variants like finding the leftmost or rightmost insertion point.

“I knew binary search cold, or thought I did.”

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Grammarly·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Phone screen for a Software Engineer role at Grammarly. Three coding questions back to back, all string or interval manipulation. Nothing too exotic but the third one had some edge cases I wasn't fully prepared for.

Given a list of intervals, merge all overlapping ones and return a sorted list of non-overlapping intervals covering the same ranges.
Repeatedly remove adjacent pairs of identical characters from a string until no more pairs remain. What is the final string?
Given a string and an integer k, repeatedly remove any k consecutive identical characters until no such group exists. Return the final string.

“Sort by start, then walk through and merge if the current interval overlaps the last one in your result list.”

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Grammarly interview FAQ

What rounds are in the Grammarly interview?

Candidates most often report a technical phone screen (17 write-ups), a system design round (16), a behavioral / leadership round (3) and a product sense round (2).

What does the Grammarly technical phone screen cover?

Across 17 technical phone screen write-ups, the most tagged question topics are Algorithms & Data Structures (22 questions), Technical Trade-offs (7) and System Design (6).

What is asked in the Grammarly system design round?

Across 16 system design write-ups, the most tagged question topics are System Design (36 questions), Technical Trade-offs (26) and Data Modeling (10).