Did Intel's coding assessment last month. Posting because I couldn't find a recent breakdown when I was prepping.
The online assessment (pre-loop): Two LeetCode-style problems, 90-minute window. You schedule it through HireVue or a similar platform. Both problems were medium difficulty, no hard. One was a graph traversal variant (BFS, straightforward), one was a string parsing problem that looked like easy but had edge cases. I saw mentions of C-style problems in older posts but mine was purely algorithmic, no systems programming. You can pick your language.
Coding rounds in the actual loop: Two rounds, each 45-50 minutes on CoderPad. The difficulty was consistently medium-to-hard-medium. I didn't see a hard in the traditional LeetCode sense. The questions felt more applied than competitive: one problem was clearly abstracted from cache eviction logic (LRU variant, classic), one was about efficiently merging sorted streams from multiple sources (merge k sorted lists but with a twist on the merge criteria). Both interviewers wanted to see me think out loud before coding, and one explicitly said to narrate my approach before touching the keyboard.
What they didn't ask: no bit manipulation puzzles, no graph coloring problems, nothing that required memorizing some obscure algorithm. It felt like they wanted to hire engineers, not algorithmic athletes.
Time complexity and space complexity discussion was mandatory on every solution. One interviewer asked me to optimize from O(n log n) to O(n) and then walked me through why that mattered in Intel's actual data processing context. That was a nice touch.
Prep I actually found useful: NeetCode 150 at around 70% completion was enough. Blind 75 is probably sufficient too. Don't grind hards obsessively, get fast and clean on mediums.