StubHub Interview Questions — Page 2

StubHub·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

StubHub backend interview focused on a single meaty design problem: build a filterable event recommendation engine from scratch. The whole conversation was around data structures, filter composition, and complexity tradeoffs. Pretty technical for a phone screen but not unreasonable for the role.

Design a simple event recommendation engine where each event has a location, date, and price. Support filters for proximity (distance in miles), date or date range, radius, and price range, and allow those filters to be combined into a single query. Walk through your data structures, how the filters compose, and the time complexity of each operation.

“This is basically a mini system design plus algorithms question rolled into one.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

StubHub software engineering interview with a deep code review question on an HTTP events endpoint. Single question but it covered a ton of ground, basically a system design and architecture review rolled into one.

You're given a GET /events handler that queries a database and lazily loads related data per event in a loop. Do a thorough code review covering readability and architecture, performance, scalability, and security. Propose concrete fixes for each area, define HTTP status code semantics, and outline a monitoring and test plan.

“This one sprawled in a way I wasn't totally ready for.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026

Behavioral round with the hiring manager at StubHub for a software engineer role. Pretty standard stuff but they go deep on your projects, so come ready to actually explain your technical decisions and not just summarize what you built.

Walk me through one or two projects from your resume in detail, including the problem, your role, the technical decisions you made, and what the outcome was.
Tell me about a project you're most proud of.
Describe a time you disagreed with a teammate or manager. How did you handle it?
Tell me about a time you failed and what you took away from it.
How do you handle situations where the requirements are unclear or keep changing?
How do you prioritize your work when you're under a tight deadline?
Why are you interested in this role and this team specifically?

“This is where I spent most of the time.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

StubHub system design round focused entirely on building a real-time internal chat platform, plus a bonus workflow question about re-engaging inactive users via email. Pretty dense for a single session but the scope made sense given the role.

Design an internal chat system for an event marketplace company that supports real-time one-to-one messaging, persistent WebSocket connections, presence tracking, and conversation history.
How would you handle message delivery for offline users, and what storage approach would you use for chat history?
Walk through how bidirectional WebSocket communication gets routed across multiple servers when the sender and recipient are connected to different nodes.
Within the same platform, design a workflow that automatically sends an email to customers who haven't logged in for 10 days.

“I started with the WebSocket layer and worked outward, which felt right but I spent too long on connection management before touching storage.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

StubHub system design round, OOD flavor. The prompt was about building an event recommendation system for a ticketing platform and the whole thing was really about whether you could design something flexible enough to compose behaviors without hardcoding campaign logic.

Design and implement an Event Recommendation System for a ticketing platform. The core constraint is that campaign logic must not be hardcoded. Different campaigns should be able to compose filtering and scoring behaviors (by distance, price, time window, etc.) flexibly.
How would you add a brand new campaign type using only existing building blocks, without modifying any core classes?
The product team has identified several signals (hometown artist affinity, seasonal patterns, deduplication of recurring event names) that are not yet validated. How would you incorporate these into the system design without committing to them permanently?
Users should always receive at least one event recommendation even when signal is weak. How does your design handle the fallback case?

“This is the whole interview basically.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

StubHub system design round, one massive question that took the whole session. The scope was genuinely intimidating and I don't think I covered even half of it cleanly.

Design a large-scale event notification system that handles at least 1 million concurrent events and sends emails to all registered participants. Cover the core APIs, architecture, data model, email delivery pipeline, capacity estimates, scheduling, rate limiting, failure handling, observability, compliance, multi-region availability, and cost. Also walk through a concrete failure scenario.

“This question is a beast.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

StubHub software engineering interview that was basically one big design problem: build a marketing notification engine with multiple campaign types and make it extensible. More involved than I expected for a phone screen.

Design a MarketingEngine class with a method that sends notifications to customers based on multiple campaign types: events in the same city, the event closest to the customer's next birthday, and the 5 geographically closest events. The design should allow new campaigns to be added without modifying the core engine.
How would you handle ties, fewer than 5 matching events, and notification message formatting in this system?

“This is where I spent most of my time.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

StubHub software engineering interview, one round focused entirely on object-oriented design. They gave me a pretty meaty system design prompt about building an email recommendation engine for a ticketing platform and wanted to see how I'd structure it cleanly while keeping it extensible.

Design an email marketing recommendation engine for a ticketing marketplace. It should match users to relevant events using pluggable recommendation strategies, starting with city-based and price-based rules, with a PriceService abstraction for pricing data. Walk through your data models, interfaces, and how you'd keep it extensible.

“The part I fumbled a bit was the PriceService wrinkle.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at StubHub for a software engineer role, focused entirely on designing a marketing email system. Pretty interesting problem space but there were a few areas where I felt like I was guessing more than reasoning.

Design a system that sends 2-3 marketing emails to users within a 15-minute delivery window.
How would you handle scheduling and delivery across multiple time zones for a marketing email campaign?
How would you design A/B testing into this email system to compare different marketing email variants?
How would you track whether emails were successfully delivered, and measure conversion effectiveness from those emails?

“The time window constraint is what made this interesting.”

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StubHub·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

StubHub coding round for a software engineer role. One meaty design-your-way problem that looked like OOP at first but turned into a mini algorithms discussion by the end.

You're extending a MarketingEngine class that holds a collection of events. Each customer has a city and a birthday, each event has a city and a date. Add a method that finds the single event whose date falls closest to the customer's next upcoming birthday and returns it for notification. Handle ties with a deterministic tiebreaker. Also discuss how you'd make this efficient.

“The birthday logic tripped me up more than I expected.”

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