D.E. Shaw · Primly Community

D.E. Shaw coding interview and online assessment: format, difficulty, and what tripped me up

mobile_mara · 5 replies

Went through two rounds of their online assessment plus two live coding phone screens recently. Here's the honest breakdown because I wish someone had told me what to actually prepare for.

The OA

Two coding problems, 90 minutes total. The platform was HackerRank. You get to choose your language. I did Python and had no issues with the environment.

Difficulty: one medium, one that I'd call medium-hard. The medium was a graph traversal problem with a twist (edge weights with conditional behavior). The harder one involved some number theory that caught me off guard. If you've only done the 'easy and medium Leetcode grind' you might hit a wall on the harder problem.

There's no proctoring camera on the OA, but don't assume that means it doesn't matter. I was told the solutions get reviewed by an engineer, not just auto-scored. Readability and correctness of your solution structure apparently matters.

Live coding phone screens

These were more open-ended than the OA. One interviewer asked a problem I'd classify as Leetcode hard (interval scheduling with a resource constraint I hadn't seen before). The other was a graph problem that was medium but with a follow-up that pushed into hard territory.

Both interviewers were fine with me thinking out loud and asking clarifying questions. One explicitly said 'take a minute before you write anything.'

What I'd prepare: Leetcode mediums until they feel easy, then start adding hards from the graph, DP, and intervals categories. The string manipulation and array sliding-window stuff is less likely to appear at the senior level. Also review time and space complexity formally. They asked me to prove my solution's time complexity in one round, not just state it.

Not a leetcode grind factory in the worst sense, but you need to be solid. It's quant finance. They hire people who can actually think about algorithmic complexity.

5 replies

newgrad_neil

Did you get the OA link right after the recruiter screen or was there a waiting period? I finished my recruiter screen yesterday and haven't gotten anything yet.

de_derek

For me it was 2 business days after the recruiter screen. If it goes past 4 days, just email the recruiter. They probably have to manually trigger it.

qa_quinn

The 'solutions reviewed by an engineer' thing is real and underrated. I made the mistake at another firm of submitting ugly code that happened to pass test cases. They told me after that the code quality was a flag. Clean code matters even on OAs.

corp_refugee

Number theory showing up tracks. They have a strong math-forward culture. If you haven't touched modular arithmetic or combinatorics since college, spend a week or two there. Nothing exotic, but it can appear.

content_cole

Counterpoint: I found the OA easier than described here. Maybe they vary it. One of my two problems was genuinely easy (just nested loops). Don't over-prepare to the point you're scared walking in.