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      The Trade Desk

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      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      2 Aug 2019
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Irvine, CA
      No offer
      Neutral experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at The Trade Desk (Irvine, CA) in May 2019

      Interview

      The process was quite slow at first, with recruiters mostly answering the messages with template emails. At some point after the call with the hiring manager it went faster and we got to the first tech task. The initial screening problem was to implement N-Way Set Associative Cache with the customizable replacement strategies. They give you like a month to solve it (while asking "do not spend much time on it"). The problem is open ended; it has a myriad of considerations. You will spend a couple of evenings to produce something industry-grade. And then more time to add docs and cover it with tests. So yeah, it's a time-consuming task. Some people can find it unacceptable, considering how picky TTD is (so high possibility that you'd be wasting time), but I think this is a proper task for a Senior Engineer - worth more than their other on-site tasks. Then we had a phone call with one of their engineers. He came unprepared and was seeing the code for the first time - we had to explore it together, as he just read the documentation (why do they ask to provide all the compilation instructions then?). The engineer still was quite knowledgeable, was asking the right questions and was able to understand the beauty of the different particular solutions made across the code. He also found a possible race condition in one of the replacement strategies (I was voluntarily taking an advanced approach to implement a thread-safe library). This left a positive impression regarding the strength of the engineers there. Then I was invited to the day of on-site interviews, where I had 4 one-hour technical sessions with the engineers + a higher tech manager + lunch with the local employees. The sessions were mostly about some hacker-coding tech tasks, where you get a single problem and need to solve it in like 30-40 minutes on a whiteboard or on a laptop. The schedule was like this (see Questions section for more details): - 1st task - 2nd task Then there was a lunch with the team - they get a modest catered lunch once in a couple of days. The folks were nice, and we had a pleasant chat. There were not a lot of the employees in Irvine office - half of the desks were empty. I had a small tour, seems like the office was kinda new. It's an open space (which I prefer). The office and the equipment looked nice - the rooms had well-done conferencing solutions, they had stand-up desks for people preferring such workplaces, it was clean and bright. TTD takes good care of working conditions in Irvine. Then the interviews continued (again - see Questions section for more details): - 3rd task - 4th task After that we had a chat with one more manager about the interview process, whom I told all the observations in this review as well. In general the interviewers were all kind and polite, everyone asked about the water or the need to have a break. The atmosphere was good. Didn't feel a lot of pressure, but it might be subjective, as I'm not afraid of interviews and like to work with people. The interviewers made the positive impression. The negative side, is that I don't think the interview process is built right for Senior people. First of all, dear reader, do you think that a software engineer that worked for 10-15 years for well-known software companies is unable to code? Or do you think that the ability to find a perfect solution for an artificial hacking problem correlates with ability to produce failure-tolerant systems or collaborate with the remotely distributed team? I won't judge, though, each company has their own path. And I might be just subjective - so feel free to say that I'm not competent :) One more negative note is that recruiters didn't seem to be very engaged into the process. As mentioned earlier - often instead of talking with you they were sending template emails. And when I came to the office none of them didn't bother to come and say "hi". Later, when the team eventually decided that I didn't pass, the recruiters never contacted me. In like ten days I sent an email asking about the results - and only then I got a standard template response that "you were great, but the company just decided to pass this time". At the same time the hiring manager and the engineers all were nice and knowledgeable. So if you don't mind the whole recruiting process and if you pass the interviews, then probably you will have a good engineering team.

      Interview questions [5]

      Question 1

      Homework: Implement N-Way Set Associative Cache
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      1st on-site task - having a database of people and events, distributed across the servers, write the code that would fetch all people and events they are going to (something like that).
      1 Answer

      Question 3

      2nd on-site task - having a list of coordinates (x, y) of the top left and right corners of the houses, draw a skyline they compose, but do not draw the lines that do not matter to the skyline (i.e. the ones going inside the skyline). Basically produce the minimum list of points that matter to drawing the skyline.
      1 Answer

      Question 4

      3rd task - having bank rates of a currency from multiple banks, calculate a single rate to provide to your client, so that he can sell/buy a particular amount of currency at the best rate.
      1 Answer

      Question 5

      4th on-site task - the interview with a higher tech manager - he asked to implement the algorithm to play Mastermind game, so that it would be solved in 12 turns or less.
      1 Answer
      15

      Other Senior Software Engineer interview reviews for The Trade Desk

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      27 Mar 2026
      Anonymous interview candidate
      Singapore
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I applied online. I interviewed at The Trade Desk (Singapore) in Feb 2026

      Interview

      1. Applied Online. 2. Received/Completed Hackerrank Online Assessment. 3. Recruiter call about the role, salary expectations and leveling -- expecting next technical interview 4. One week later recruiter reached out that the role has been filled.

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      Recruiter asked what's your salary expectation?
      Answer question

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      19 Sept 2025
      Anonymous interview candidate
      No offer
      Negative experience
      Difficult interview

      Application

      I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at The Trade Desk in Sept 2025

      Interview

      Online Assessment, followed by a Hiring Manager interview that was System Design + Behavioral. Didn't pass that stage, was not given a reason, but I assume it was the system design portion. Next stage would have been a loop (2 coding + 1 system design).

      Interview questions [2]

      Question 1

      System Design: Video watching platform (YouTube)
      1 Answer

      Question 2

      Behavioral only had one question (what was your most challenging project?), was mostly focused on specific technologies I used at previous job.
      Answer question
      1

      Senior Software Engineer Interview

      25 Aug 2025
      Anonymous employee
      San Francisco, CA
      Accepted offer
      Positive experience
      Average interview

      Application

      I interviewed at The Trade Desk (San Francisco, CA)

      Interview

      - recruiter - hiring manager chat about exp - coding screen - onsite Overall pretty standard interview and good experience hence why i joined. interviews were collaborative and practical rather than obscure algorithms

      Interview questions [1]

      Question 1

      why do you want to join the trade desk?
      Answer question