Pure Storage Interview Questions — Page 2

Pure Storage·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Pure Storage SWE interview, coding round focused on data structure design. One question but it had enough layers to keep me busy for the whole session.

Design a data structure that supports insert, remove, and getRandom operations, each running in O(1) average time.

“I knew the hash map piece pretty quickly but then stared at getRandom for an embarrassingly long time.”

View Post

Pure Storage·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed at Pure Storage, came up pretty quickly into a question about PM relationships. Short but the kind of question that makes you realize how much baggage you're carrying from past jobs.

Tell me about a time working with a PM that went well, and a time it didn't.

“I had a decent 'went well' story ready but the 'didn't go well' part is where I fumbled a bit.”

View Post

Pure Storage·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Pure Storage coding interview for a software engineer role, focused entirely on a geometry problem about detecting and counting squares from point coordinates. The problem had multiple parts with increasing complexity, which I did not fully anticipate going in.

Given exactly 4 points on a 2D plane, determine whether they form a valid (possibly rotated) square.
Given N points on a 2D plane, count how many distinct squares can be formed using 4 of those points as vertices. Walk through a brute-force O(n^4) approach, then optimize to O(n^3), then to O(n^2).

“Part A felt manageable.”

View Post

Pure Storage·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

Pure Storage system design round, focused entirely on making a timer/event-scheduling system thread-safe. Pretty deep dive, more implementation-level than I expected for a design interview.

You have a single-threaded event scheduler with a min-heap and a sleeping worker. How would you make it thread-safe when multiple producer threads are calling schedule and cancel concurrently?
How would you scale this timer system to handle multiple worker threads consuming due events?

“I started with the obvious answer, lock around the heap, condition variable to wake the worker when a new earliest-fire-time gets inserted.”

View Post

Pure Storage·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a software engineer role at Pure Storage and got a geometry problem I did not see coming. One coding round, fairly algorithmic, nothing behavioral from what I remember.

Given four 2D points, write a function to determine whether they form a valid square (axis-aligned or rotated).

“My first instinct was to check slopes and distances separately and I immediately started going down a path involving floating point comparisons which felt wrong even as I was saying it.”

View Post

Pure Storage·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Pure Storage SWE interview with a coding problem that pushed me through a few optimization rounds. The interviewer was pretty reasonable about not needing a closed-form formula, which helped.

Given a grid, count the number of squares (of any size) that can be formed.

“Started at the brute force O(n^4) and worked down from there.”

View Post

Pure Storage·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

Pure Storage system design round, one meaty question about ID allocation that spiraled into a bunch of follow-ups I wasn't fully ready for. The core concept felt familiar but the async and reclaim angles pushed me into territory I had to think through on the fly.

Design a service with a getID() API that returns a globally unique ID on every call, supporting high concurrency, async clients, and an optional releaseID() operation for reuse.

“Started with the obvious stuff: a central counter with a distributed lock.”

View Post