Verkada Interview Questions — Page 2

Verkada·Frontend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Verkada frontend interview had at least one algorithmic problem, which surprised me a bit for a frontend role. The coin change problem is a classic but it still requires you to actually know your DP fundamentals cold.

Given an array of coin denominations and a target amount, return the minimum number of coins needed to reach that amount. Return -1 if it's not possible. You have unlimited coins of each denomination.

“Knew this one but still fumbled the initialization step for a second.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Did a technical phone screen for a software engineer role at Verkada. The problem was genuinely interesting but I fumbled an edge case in the IP parsing logic and I'm pretty sure that cost me the round.

Given a filesystem path, recursively traverse all directories and files, extract all valid IP addresses found in file contents, and return them sorted in lexicographic order.

“The concept clicked fast but execution was messier than I'd like to admit.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Interviewed at Verkada for a software engineer role and got a time series problem that looked clean on the surface but had a bunch of edge cases hiding underneath. The clarification phase was basically the whole challenge.

You're given a time series from a surveillance camera as a list of (timestamp, value) pairs with strictly increasing timestamps. Given a threshold T, find and return all maximal contiguous intervals where the value exceeds T.

“The problem sounds like a basic scan until you actually think about what 'interval' means for irregular samples.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Verkada focused entirely on building an access-control service for cameras, users, and nested groups. Pretty deep dive, lots of follow-ups on things I thought I'd covered.

Design an access-control service that manages users, cameras, and nested groups, and can answer queries like 'does user U have access to camera C?' and 'which users have access to all cameras?'
How would you handle cycle prevention in group hierarchies?
Walk through your approach to precomputing transitive group memberships versus doing on-demand graph traversal. What are the tradeoffs?
How would you propagate authorization changes consistently across the system when a group membership is updated?
What indexing and caching strategies would you use to make access-check queries fast?
How would you approach sharding and scaling this service as the number of users and cameras grows?
How would you design the auditing layer to track who had access to what camera and when?

“This is the whole interview basically.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Verkada phone screen for a software engineer role, pretty much one meaty algorithmic problem the whole time. The question was a follow-up to an earlier camera alert problem, so it built on assumed context which threw me a little.

Given alert intervals from multiple surveillance cameras, where each camera produces a sorted, non-overlapping list of intervals, merge all intervals across all cameras into a single sorted list of non-overlapping intervals representing any time range where at least one camera was in alert state. Aim for an O(N log k) solution.

“This is basically interval merging but across k sorted lists instead of one flat list.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Verkada SWE interview that went deep into graph traversal pretty fast. The core problem was about access control across nested group structures and it turned into a full design exercise with complexity analysis and edge case discussion.

Given a system where users can own cameras directly or belong to groups that own cameras, and groups can be nested inside other groups arbitrarily, design an algorithm to find all admin users who have access to every camera. Cover your input representation, how you handle cycles in group membership, a BFS-based traversal approach, and time/space complexity.

“This one took me a minute to even set up properly.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Verkada coding screen, one question about validating a Sudoku board. Pretty standard algorithmic problem but the edge cases tripped me up more than I expected.

Given a 9x9 Sudoku board that may be partially filled, determine whether it is valid. Each row, column, and 3x3 sub-box must contain the digits 1-9 with no repeats. Empty cells are marked with a dot and don't need to be validated.

“I went straight for sets and tracked each row, column, and box in a single pass.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Verkada software engineer screen that was basically one coding problem plus a threading tangent I was not fully prepared for. The main question was straightforward but the follow-up is where things got interesting.

Given a 9x9 Sudoku board where some cells are empty (marked as '.'), write a function to determine whether the current state is valid. A board is valid if no row, column, or 3x3 sub-box contains duplicate digits from 1 to 9. Empty cells are ignored.
How would you use multithreading to speed up the Sudoku validation, and does it actually help for a problem this size? Where would parallelism make more sense?

“Knocked this out fine.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Verkada coding round, one problem the whole time. It was the LFU cache design question which I'd seen before but still fumbled parts of the implementation under pressure.

Design and implement an LFU (Least Frequently Used) cache class with get and put operations, both running in O(1) time. On eviction, remove the least frequently used key, breaking ties by least recently used.

“I knew the problem going in and still got tripped up on the tie-breaking logic.”

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Verkada·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

Verkada system design round, one meaty question about real-time device telemetry at scale. The whole session was basically a single deep-dive and they just kept pulling on threads until time ran out.

Design a system that handles 1 million devices each sending a heartbeat every minute with one of 10 possible status values. The system needs to compute, in real time, the count of devices per status over the previous minute window. Walk through ingestion, time-bucketing, partitioning, aggregation approach, state storage with TTL, fault tolerance, late and duplicate events, and how to serve the per-status counts with low latency.

“This one sprawled.”

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