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MathWorks interview notes, page 4 of 5

Large Enterprises

Most of these MathWorks write-ups come from Software Engineers (41). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (29), the behavioral / leadership round (4), the recruiter screen (3) and the hiring manager screen (2).

41 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
MathWorks coding interview, sliding window problem that looks straightforward until you're actually in it trying to remember how to shrink the window correctly under pressure.
  • Given a string and a set of required characters, find the length of the shortest contiguous substring that contains at least one of every required character. Return -1 if no such substring exists.

“Classic sliding window but I fumbled the shrinking logic at first.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
MathWorks software engineer interview with a tricky array manipulation problem that looks straightforward but has a subtle edge case worth thinking through carefully.
  • You have an array of integers and a number K. You must perform exactly K operations, where each operation decrements any single element by 1. After using all K operations, what is the maximum possible value of the minimum element in the array?

“The first instinct is binary search on the answer, which is right, but I almost missed the 'exactly K' part.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
MathWorks software engineer interview hit me with a classic array problem but with a twist that made me think harder than expected. The algorithmic depth they wanted was real, not just a surface-level solution.
  • Given an integer array and a target value T, you can repeatedly remove two elements that sum to T. What is the maximum number of such removal operations you can perform? Walk through an O(n) solution using a hash map and an O(n log n) solution using sorting with two pointers, prove both are correct, and cover edge cases like duplicates, negative numbers, and large values.

“I went for the hash map approach first since it felt cleaner to explain.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
MathWorks software engineer interview with a graph problem that sounds manageable until you actually think about the state space. The Dijkstra angle was clear enough but the implementation details got hairy fast.
  • Given a weighted directed graph, you can add up to K extra edges each with weight 1 between any nodes you choose. Find the minimum-weight path from node 1 to the last node after placing those extra edges optimally.

“My first instinct was just run Dijkstra and call it a day, which is obviously wrong.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
MathWorks software engineer interview with a meaty string manipulation problem that required algorithm explanation, correctness proof, complexity analysis, and working code. Pretty demanding for a single question but that seems to be their style.
  • You have two strings s and t of equal length over lowercase letters. In one move, you can delete any character from s and append it to s's end. What is the minimum number of such moves to turn s into t, and can you always do it? Explain your approach, prove it's correct, analyze the complexity, and write working code.

“This one took me a minute to even parse correctly.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
MathWorks software engineer interview with a classic task assignment optimization problem. Clean problem statement, but the efficiency constraint is what makes it interesting.
  • You have n tasks to split between two interns, where intern 1 gets exactly k tasks and intern 2 gets the rest. Each task has a different reward depending on which intern does it. How do you maximize the total reward? Your solution needs to handle n up to 10^5 efficiently.

“My first instinct was brute force and I immediately knew that wasn't going to fly at that scale.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
MathWorks software engineer interview with a meaty constraint-satisfaction problem that covered algorithm design, data structures, complexity analysis, and pseudocode all in one question. Pretty demanding for a single problem but it felt like they wanted to see how far you could take it.
  • You have a set of locations on a 2D grid and a list of relational constraints: directional clues (north/south/east/west), adjacency or non-adjacency, row/column exclusions, and an 'exactly one of a set is adjacent to a target' rule. Design an algorithm to find the unique grid position of a target person given these constraints, describe your data structures, analyze time and space complexity, and write pseudocode.

“This was a lot to unpack.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Went through a probability-heavy technical screen for a software engineering role at MathWorks. The questions were all math-focused, which I half expected but still felt underprepared for when it came to showing my work clearly.
  • An urn has 5 red and 7 blue balls. If you draw two balls without replacement, what is the probability of getting at least one red ball?
  • Given the first ball drawn is blue, what is the probability the second ball drawn is red?
  • What is the expected number of red balls drawn across two draws from the same urn? Walk through the math.

“I went with the complement approach: probability of zero reds is (7/12)*(6/11) which gives 42/132, so at least one red is 1 minus that, about 0.682.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
MathWorks software engineer interview with a focused algorithmic problem around array pair removal. Pretty standard coding round but they pushed hard on complexity analysis and wanted you to actually justify your approach, not just code it up.
  • Given an integer array and a target value k, you can remove pairs of indices where the two elements sum to k. Each index can only be used once. What is the maximum number of such pair removals you can perform? They also asked you to design an O(n) or O(n log n) solution, discuss the space-time trade-offs, and write working code.

“The core idea clicked pretty fast: use a frequency map, iterate through the array, and for each element check if its complement exists.”

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MathWorks·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
MathWorks SWE interview with a graph problem that looks straightforward until you actually sit with it. One question, but it had enough depth to keep me busy for the whole session.
  • You have a weighted directed graph with n nodes. You can add any number of directed edges, each with weight 1, between any nodes you choose. After adding edges optimally, what is the minimum possible shortest-path distance from node 1 to node n?

“My first instinct was just Dijkstra and call it a day, which was wrong.”

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