Purestorage·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.”