Nvidia’s Interview Process & Questions

The info below is based on conversations with Nvidia engineers in 2024.

Nvidia's Interview Process for Software Engineers: 2-4 Steps

Mid to senior-level engineers interviewing at Nvidia can expect the following process:

• [Can skip if referred in] Recruiter call (30 minutes)
• Technical phone screen (1 hour)
• [Not always] Hiring Manager call (30 minutes)
• Onsite (5 hours)

Nvidia has a decentralized process that varies based on the hiring manager's preference, e.g., some people we spoke with had no recruiter screen and some had no hiring manager call before the onsite. One candidate even had their hiring manager call first, before anything else happened! The onsite rounds can also change a lot. We will do our best to sketch out the process, but yours may differ depending on the role you are interviewing for. While there is some flexibility regarding what role you end up interviewing for, you don’t seem to be able to interview for multiple teams. All of your interviewers will be from the team you are interviewing for.

One engineer we spoke to, who interviewed with Nvidia for two separate teams told us:

If you get an early hiring manager call, you can ask them exactly what to expect in the rest of the rounds. If they say the language is the priority, brush up on those skills, if they say it will be more general, then focus on general coding.

General tips:

• LeetCode practice will help, but they will throw in more practical questions too.
• They don’t have an internal question bank, so the interview questions are up to the individual interviewer.
• Nvidia puts a premium on experience and advanced academic degrees.
• A good (senior) referral can help you skip the recruiter call.
• Most roles they hire for are software-orientedsoftware oriented, not hardware as you might expect
• If you fail with one team, you can immediately interview with another one, but you will have to go through the whole process again, though it’s possible you’ll be able to skip the technical phone screen.
• They will always have at least one interview that is focused on the language you will need for whatever team you are joining.

The entire process takes about 6-8 weeks.

Step 1: Recruiter Call

Nvidia’s recruiter call lasts 30 minutes, and it’s pretty standard fare – they’ll ask you about your previous experience, and why you’re interested in Nvidia and do some basic skills assessment.

It’s really important, at this stage, to not reveal your salary expectations or where you are in the process with other companies. We’ve written a detailed post about salary negotiation that lays out exactly what to say if recruiters pressure you to name the first number.

Step 2: Technical Phone Screen

You might start with 15 minutes of general chat in this round but, the guts of the interview will be technical. In the general chat, you might be asked about your background and why you’re interested in Nvidia. The technical portion will be 45 minutes long. One engineer we spoke to was asked only LLM questions here and everything was done in PyTorch, but this is largely dependent on the role you are interviewing for. Nvidia is very focused on hiring engineers with LLM experience right now so, if that’s what you applied to, expect LLM questions rather than general CS skill questions. If not, expect a LeetCode medium-style question, but remember, they don’t have an internal bank from what we’ve heard, so you might get something more practical too.

If you are asked LLM questions, expect them to focus on concepts such as:

• Mixture-of-experts model
• Beam search
• Autoregressive decoding with KV-cache
• Low-rank adaptation (LoRA)
• High-level distributed computing

For example, you might be asked to implement beam search for LLM inference and evaluate the time complexity of each operation.

Step 3: Hiring Manager Call

This is usually split into two parts. You will be asked about your background and experience in the first part. The hiring manager will be testing for culture fit. In the second part, they will be selling you on the role and team.

Step 4: Onsite

This will vary by role but here’s what you can expect.

• Coding x 2 (1 hour each). This interview will be conducted in CoderPad. For more detail about the kinds of questions to expect, see the Coding section below.
• System design (1 hour). For more detail about the kinds of questions to expect, see the System Design section below.
• Second Coding (1 hour). For more detail about the kinds of questions to expect, see the Coding (domain-specific) section below.
• Hiring Manager (1 hour). For more detail about the kinds of questions to expect, see the Hiring Manager interview section below.

Types of Interview Questions to Expect at Nvidia

Coding

Ok, things can vary quite a bit here, as with everything in the Nvidia hiring process! One engineer we spoke to had 2 low-level coding rounds that were very practical and domain-aligned for the team he interviewed with. Others got more standard LeetCode-style questions during these two rounds.

We also heard that there are different formats for the coding rounds for certain teams. You might get a problem to solve in some and have to review existing code in others, similar to a debugging round.

If the role you have applied to will rely heavily on Cuda, expect to be interviewed in C++. Every role at Nvidia is a bit different though so lot’s of languages are used. It should be clear from the job description if there is a specific language required. If not, ask the hiring manager in advance so you are prepared!

Below are the technical topics you’re likely to encounter in Nvidia interviews. To compile this list, we did two things. First, we spoke to some current and former Nvidia engineers. Then we cross-referenced all the anecdotes we heard with Glassdoor data AND our own data-set of mock interviews.

First, here’s a list of more niche technical topics that are, in our experience, specific to Nvidia:

• C++ Fundamentals
• LLMs
  • See the technical phone screen section above for examples of LLM sub-topics

And here are technical topics that you’re likely to find at other companies as well (for these we’ve created detailed write-ups of their own):

Coding (Domain-Specific)

This will be a more practical round. You might be asked to reimplement an algorithm from first principles. You might get a mix of technical questions and actual coding to do. Whatever you get will be specific to the role you are interviewing for.

System Design

This will more than likely be a pretty standard system design round but, again, things vary from team to team. Brush up on the usual questions like “How would you design Twitter / Uber / a chatbot for a website,” BUT they may ask you something more practical for the role. Learn about CPU/GPU architecture and anything else relevant to the team you are interviewing for!

Check out our guide to system design interviews to help you prepare.

Hiring Manager Interview

This will be more conversational than the other rounds but could have behavioral/experience-based questions, as well as technical questions depending on the hiring manager.

How Nvidia Makes Hiring Decisions

After the onsite, the panel all submit a scorecard. You don’t need to score perfectly (it’s from 1-5) on each scorecard, but it’s unlikely to be hired if you’ve scored poorly on even one round.