Just got through the Coca-Cola online assessment and phone screen for a mid-level SWE role. Posting this because there's almost nothing online about their actual coding interview format and it caused me unnecessary stress trying to guess what to prepare for.
The online assessment (OA): Two coding questions, 90 minutes total. Delivered through HackerRank. No proctoring as far as I could tell.
Question 1: Array manipulation, medium difficulty. Think two-pointer or sliding window territory. I solved it with a clean O(n) approach and got full credit.
Question 2: Graph or tree problem. Mine was specifically about finding connected components in an undirected graph, which if you know your BFS/DFS is a standard medium. I've seen others mention they got a variant with weighted nodes, so it's probably a bank of similar-difficulty problems.
No SQL questions, no system design in the OA. Pure algorithms.
Time pressure was real. 90 minutes for two mediums is fine if you know the patterns cold. If you're still working through the intuition on BFS, I'd practice that before hitting submit.
The phone screen after the OA: One more coding problem, this time done with a recruiter/hiring manager watching live. Similar difficulty. Python or Java both accepted. I did Python. They asked me to talk through my thinking as I went, so this was more of a pair-programming vibe than a pure algorithm test.
They also asked one or two verbal questions about how I'd handle a large codebase you've never seen before. Not technical exactly, more behavioral-adjacent.
One heads up: the OA invite came fast, like 3 days after the recruiter screen. Don't sit on it. I almost wasn't ready.
Overall: if you're comfortable with Leetcode mediums and you've drilled graphs and arrays, you're prepared. Nothing exotic, but no freebies either.