doing this from a lunch break so keeping it tight.
Reddit's coding process as of early 2026, at least for the backend/SWE track:
OA first. it's a HackerRank-style timed assessment, 90 minutes, two problems. difficulty: one medium, one medium-hard. the medium was a string manipulation problem with some edge cases. the medium-hard was graph-adjacent, basically BFS/DFS over a 2D grid. nothing crazy if you've done 60+ leetcode problems in the past month, but you can't half-ass it.
then a live coding round in the loop. this is where it actually matters. 45 min, one problem, coderpad. your interviewer can see what you're typing in real time. they'll ask you to talk through your approach first, which i actually liked. you're not being judged purely on speed.
what they seem to care about: clarity of code, variable naming, handling edge cases before you're asked, and asking clarifying questions up front. one interviewer literally said 'i don't care if you use the optimal solution first, i want to see how you think.'
i got a tree problem in the live round. medium difficulty. the trick was handling the base case correctly, which i nearly botched. interviewer gave a small hint, i caught it, finished clean.
what i'd say to prep: do mediums until they feel boring. understand trees, graphs, and hashmaps cold. the OA is a filter, the live round is the real signal. and don't skip the 'talk through your approach' step, it genuinely helps them and helps you catch dumb mistakes.