← Back to Directory

Whatnot

Mid-sized

Most of these Whatnot write-ups come from Software Engineers (25), then Machine Learning Engineers (3) and Mobile Engineers (3). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (20), the system design round (7), the product sense round (3) and the hiring manager screen (1).

32 interview notes · updated Sep 2026

Whatnot·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Coding interview at Whatnot for a Software Engineer role. The task was building a functional Tic-Tac-Toe app in 45 minutes, which sounds trivial until you're actually in it trying to keep state clean and not embarrass yourself.
  • Build a working Tic-Tac-Toe mobile app within 45 minutes. It needs a 3x3 grid, two local players alternating turns, win and draw detection, move prevention after the game ends, a status display, and a reset button.

“The scope felt manageable at first but the win detection logic is where I started second-guessing myself.”

View Post

Whatnot·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Whatnot MLE interview focused on designing a full trending livestream recommendation system, which sounds scoped until you realize they want you to cover everything from feature collection to failure handling. The follow-up about stream liveness caught me a little flat-footed.
  • Design an end-to-end ML system for surfacing trending livestreams to users on a live-commerce platform. A scoring model already exists as a service. Walk through product goals, success metrics, feature collection, candidate generation, ranking, architecture, and scaling.
  • How would you prevent stale, ended, low-quality, or spammy streams from appearing in the trending feed?
  • Follow-up: How do you guarantee that a stream shown in the trending feed is actually still live at the moment a user sees it?
  • How would you approach experimentation and monitoring for this trending feed system?

“This is a beast of a question and I think I spent too long on the feature collection part early on, which left me rushing through the online/offline architecture at the end.”

View Post

Whatnot·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed for a software engineer role at WhatNot and came out of it feeling genuinely rattled, less because of the problems themselves and more because of how the interviewer handled the feedback mid-interview. Two coding questions each with follow-ups in 40 minutes, and the back half turned into a pretty uncomfortable experience.
  • Given a string, remove all runs of consecutive duplicate characters. Follow-up: what if a run can contain any number of matching characters, not just pairs?
  • Merge two sorted arrays and return a sorted array of their squared values. Follow-up: handle negative numbers in the input arrays.

“The base version was fine, stack-based, explained complexity, tested it.”

View Post

Whatnot·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
One system design question for a software engineer role at Whatnot. Short and to the point, nothing else to report.
  • Design a platform like LeetCode from scratch.

“Classic system design prompt but there's actually a lot hiding under the surface.”

View Post

Whatnot·Frontend Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026
Behavioral round at Whatnot for a frontend role that went deeper into product and data territory than I expected. The whole thing was basically one long project deep-dive centered on a conversion-rate metric, and they really wanted to get into the weeds on experimentation and trade-offs.
  • Walk me through a project where you worked to improve a business conversion-rate metric. What was the goal, what hypotheses did you form, what experiments did you run, and what happened?

“This was basically the entire interview.”

View Post

Whatnot·Mobile Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Whatnot mobile interview had me build a small app with two list views that had to stay in sync. The time pressure was real and caught me off guard more than the actual problem did.
  • Build a small app with two list views that both fetch and update data, where changes made in one view are reflected in the other in real time.

“The sync part is what trips you up if you're not thinking about it from the start.”

View Post

Whatnot·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Whatnot software engineer interview with a two-part coding problem around building a content safety filter for a chat platform. The problem started straightforward but the follow-up pushed into trie territory pretty fast.
  • Given a list of chat messages and a list of banned words, return only the messages whose text contains none of the banned words. Tokenization is whitespace-only, punctuation stays attached to tokens, and matching is case-insensitive.
  • Extend the filter to support banned phrases (multi-word sequences). A phrase matches only if its words appear as consecutive tokens in the message, in order, case-insensitively. The follow-up asks you to do this efficiently using a single left-to-right pass over each message's tokens rather than checking every phrase independently at each position.

“The punctuation rule is what trips people up.”

View Post

Whatnot·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Did a technical phone screen for a software engineer role at Whatnot. Pretty short session, just one coding problem and that was about it.
  • Given a sorted array of integers, return a new array of the squares of each number, also in sorted order.

“Classic two-pointer problem once you see it, but I fumbled around for a bit thinking about just squaring everything and sorting after.”

View Post

Whatnot·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Technical phone screen for a software engineer role at Whatnot. One coding problem, pretty algorithmic, centered on text filtering with a Trie. They also wanted a complexity discussion at the end which I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • Given an array of messages (each a dict mapping a username to text) and a list of unsafe multi-word phrases, filter out any message whose text contains one of those phrases as a contiguous word sequence. Tokenize correctly so punctuation doesn't break matches. Implement using a Trie over phrase tokens, then discuss time and space complexity.

“This was a meaty one.”

View Post

Whatnot·Mobile Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Product sense round for a Mobile Engineer role at Whatnot. The interviewer asked how you'd improve their app, then kept drilling into implementation details, success metrics, A/B testing, and downstream effects on other users. More of a conversation than a one-and-done answer situation.
  • How would you improve the Whatnot app?

“This sounds open-ended but the follow-ups are where it gets real.”

View Post

Whatnot interview FAQ

What rounds are in the Whatnot interview?

Candidates most often report a technical phone screen (20 write-ups), a system design round (7), a product sense round (3) and a hiring manager screen (1).

What does the Whatnot technical phone screen cover?

Across 20 technical phone screen write-ups, the most tagged question topics are Algorithms & Data Structures (26 questions), Technical Trade-offs (13) and System Design (6).