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Reddit interview notes, page 6 of 6

Large Enterprises

Most of these Reddit write-ups come from Machine Learning Engineers (23), then Software Engineers (21) and Data Scientists (5). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (29), the system design round (14), the product sense round (5) and the behavioral / leadership round (3).

52 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Reddit·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Reddit coding interview focused entirely on a reporting chain problem, basically a tree traversal setup with multiple sub-problems. The tricky part was that each sub-question had a different expected output format, which I didn't fully register until I was already mid-answer.
  • Given an employee/manager hierarchy, write a query to find who a given employee's manager is.
  • Write a query to list all direct and indirect reports under a given manager.
  • Find the lowest common manager of two given employees in the hierarchy.

“Pretty straightforward self-join on the same table.”

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Reddit·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Reddit coding interview that was basically a word ladder variant with a twist. The problem itself wasn't too bad once I recognized the BFS angle, but the follow-up questions on complexity and large-dictionary optimizations pushed me more than I expected.
  • Given a start word, an end word, and a dictionary of same-length words, find the shortest transformation sequence where each step changes exactly 1 or 2 characters (substitutions only) and every intermediate word must be in the dictionary. Return the path or an empty list if none exists.
  • Why would you choose BFS over DFS for finding the shortest path in this word transformation problem?
  • What is the time and space complexity of your solution?
  • How would you optimize this solution for very large dictionaries?
  • How does your solution behave when the start word is not present in the dictionary?

“I recognized the word ladder pattern pretty fast but the '1 or 2 characters' twist tripped me up for a minute.”

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