Electronic Arts · Primly Community

Electronic Arts coding interview / online assessment, format and difficulty: went through it in spring 2026

backend_bekah · 5 replies

ok so I just finished the EA online assessment and phone screen process and I want to dump everything I remember because I was desperately searching for recent info and couldn't find much.

The OA (online assessment). Hosted on HackerRank, two problems, 90 minutes. You get the full time even if you finish early, so don't rush and miss edge cases. Mine were: A graph problem. Given a set of game servers and latency between them, find the path that minimizes max edge weight (basically a min bottleneck path variant). Not a pure shortest path, closer to a modified Dijkstra or Kruskal. A string manipulation problem. Nothing fancy, felt like LC medium string operations. Process input, handle edge cases, output formatted result.

Overall difficulty: solid mediums. Not easy mediums where you just brute force, but nothing that required obscure algorithmic knowledge. I spent about 35 min on problem 1, 25 on problem 2, had time to clean up and double-check.

Things that helped. Making sure my solutions handled the edge cases they explicitly listed. Their test cases do hit things like empty input, single element, etc. Write clean readable code, not hyper-optimized. I used Python, no issues.

The phone technical screen. This was a 60-minute video call. First 15 minutes: talking about my projects and background. Then a LeetCode-style problem on a shared coding environment. Mine was a sliding window / two-pointer problem, again medium. They asked me to talk through my approach before coding, which I appreciated because I'd prepped for that.

After the coding problem, the last 10-15 minutes were behavioral: tell me about a time you dealt with a bug under time pressure, tell me about working on a team that disagreed, etc. Pretty standard but they actually followed up with "what would you do differently" which caught me a little off guard.

Timeline for me. Applied through their careers site, heard back in about 10 days. OA link came same day as the email. OA results to phone screen invite was about a week. Phone screen to next steps was 2 weeks (felt long but they were apparently running multiple parallel loops).

I'm still waiting on whether I'm moving to onsite so I'll post an update if I do. If you've been through the full onsite recently, please drop your experience below.

5 replies

ds_dmitri

The graph problem sounds like it might be a variant they recycle. I got something very similar for a data engineering adjacent SWE role at EA last year. Min bottleneck path, definitely want to know modified Dijkstra or just think of it as max spanning tree problem in disguise.

bootcamp_bri

Thank you for posting this. Did they specify what languages you could use for the OA? And did they care if you used Python vs Java vs C++? I imagine for a games company C++ might be preferred.

newgrad_neil

The HackerRank environment had like 10+ languages available. I used Python with no issues. For the games-specific teams (engine, Frostbite) I've heard C++ proficiency matters more in the interview conversation, but the OA itself they don't seem to care about language. Check the job description though, some roles say C++ required.

contractor_kai

Two mediums in 90 min is pretty reasonable honestly. A lot of companies have moved toward that format instead of one hard problem. Less random outcome variance.

alex_design

Not a SWE so the coding parts don't apply to me, but the behavioral questions at the end of the screen are consistent with what I saw in design interviews at EA. They like the "what would you do differently" follow-up. Prep for it.