did PayPal's online assessment last month for a senior SWE role. sharing format details because I couldn't find good info before going in.
the OA itself: HackerRank platform, 90 minutes, 2 coding questions. no proctoring that I could tell. the questions I got were medium difficulty on the leetcode scale. one was a graph/BFS problem, the other was string manipulation with some edge cases that required careful reading.
not going to lie, I expected fintech-specific questions (like design a ledger, or validate transaction data) but it was pretty standard algorithm/data structure fare. trees, graphs, string parsing. nothing that felt payments-adjacent.
what to prep: sliding window, two pointers, BFS/DFS, hash maps for frequency counting. maybe one dynamic programming question if you're unlucky, but my batch seemed lighter on DP. I've heard from a friend who did the PayPal OA a few months ago that she got a DP problem though, so don't skip it entirely.
the technical phone screen after the OA: one coding question, 45 minutes, via CoderPad. medium leetcode difficulty again. the interviewer let me talk through my approach before coding, which was nice. they asked about time/space complexity at the end.
overall the coding bar feels like a solid mid-level SWE bar, not FAANG hard. if you can reliably pass leetcode medium under time pressure, you're in good shape. I've done Google and Meta loops recently and PayPal's coding difficulty is meaningfully lower, but don't show up cold.
week 31 of my search, PayPal is one of the few places I've had a decent experience so far. process was organized, recruiter was responsive. that's worth something.