Genentech · Primly Community

Genentech coding interview / online assessment, format and difficulty (my experience 2026)

mobile_mara · 5 replies

Did the Genentech OA earlier this year while I was passively looking. Sharing because I couldn't find much recent info and the older posts were vague.

Platform: HackerRank. Two coding problems, 90 minutes. You get to pick your language. I did Python.

Difficulty: Both were medium on the LeetCode scale. One was a classic array/sliding-window problem dressed up in biotech language (I genuinely laughed a little). The other was a graph traversal problem. Nothing hard. No DP, no segment trees, nothing that requires knowing some obscure trick. If you're LC medium-comfortable you'll be fine.

No system design or SQL in the OA. That comes later in the process if you pass.

Time pressure: 90 minutes for two mediums felt very reasonable. I finished in about 55 minutes and spent the rest cleaning up edge cases. They do run hidden test cases so don't just get it working for the examples.

One catch: there was a short written section at the end, two or three open-ended questions like "describe your approach" and "what would you change if the input was 10x larger." I almost skipped these because I was relieved the coding was done. Don't skip them. I'm guessing they look at them.

After the OA I heard back in about 8 business days. For a pharma company that is honestly fast. Recruiter call was next.

I'm a mid-level backend SWE, 6 YOE. Role was in their gRED (Research and Early Development) software group.

5 replies

newgrad_neil

The written section tip is gold, thank you. I have a habit of closing the tab the second my code passes. How long were your written answers? Like, a few sentences or a few paragraphs?

quietquit_quincy

Probably 3-5 sentences each. Enough to show I actually thought about it. Not an essay. For the scalability question I mentioned switching from O(n^2) to a better data structure and roughly what the tradeoff would be.

de_derek

8 business days to hear back is legitimately fast for a company that size. Most of pharma/biotech takes 3+ weeks between any two steps. Either they're under pressure to hire or this pipeline is unusually healthy.

frontend_fran

Did they allow JavaScript? Curious because some HackerRank setups for backend roles quietly don't have it or have an older version.

quietquit_quincy

I didn't check JS specifically but Python, Java, C++, and Go were all there. I'd assume JS was too. You could ask the recruiter beforehand, they're generally fine with that question.