Robinhood’s Interview Process & Questions

Robinhood's Interview Process for Software Engineers: 5 Steps

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

• Recruiter call (30 minutes)
• Technical phone screen (1 hour)
• Recruiter prep call (30 minutes)
• Onsite (5 hours)
• Team matching

Robinhood’s process is centralized, meaning that everyone follows the same standardized process and team matching happens at the end. Moreover, the people interviewing you won’t necessarily be from your future team (and likely won’t be).

Step 1: Recruiter Call

This step doesn’t happen 100% of the time. It depends on whether Robinhood recruiters reached out to you or whether you applied. If you applied, you do the recruiter call, and it’s standard stuff. They’ll discuss the role, expectations, your previous work history and Robinhood itself.

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

Step 2: Technical Phone Screen

Robinhood's technical phone screen combines algorithms/data structures and system design, conducted through Karat. If you haven’t interviewed at a company that uses Karat before, it’s basically interviewer-as-a-service – companies pay them to conduct interviews on their behalf. This means that the person you’ll be talking to isn’t a Robinhood employee and won’t be able to answer questions about the team, roadmap, projects, etc. Their only objective is to screen you.

There are 30 minutes for each section, the coding portion will often feature one or two medium difficulty questions, whereas the system design will focus on general knowledge in a trivia-like format.

Step 3: Second Recruiter Call

The second recruiter call is meant primarily to prep you for the onsite, especially if you didn’t do the first call.

Step 4: Onsite

The onsite at Robinhood consists of 5 interview rounds with the following steps:

• Coding (1 hour)
• System design (2 hour)
• Past project review (1 hour)
• Hiring manager call (1 hour)

Coding

This is an algorithms and data structures interview. Robinhood places an emphasis on correctness over scalability. These interviews typically happen in CoderPad.

System Design

Typically, the onsite interviews include two system design interview rounds, each covering different aspects. One interview assesses your familiarity with a wide range of system design concepts, emphasizing high-level and well-rounded solutions. The other interview will delve into a specific facet of system design, challenging you to problem-solve in a more targeted area

Past Project Review

The past project round will evaluate your ability to communicate about technical topics. You’ll be asked to prepare something ahead of time based on a prompt. Be ready to discuss what you bring in depth. An example prompt is: Prepare a system diagram of a previous project.

Hiring Manager Call

Robinhood’s hiring manager call is a standard assessment of behavioral and cultural fit. The discussions are centered around role-related scenarios, with the aim of gauging problem solving and communication abilities.

Types of Interview Questions to Expect at Robinhood

Coding

Robinhood has a question bank with company-specific versions of common questions, but it’s not mandatory for interviewers to use, so there will often be a mix of those and other standard medium difficulty coding problems.

To figure out what specific types of questions to expect in Robinhood interviews, we did two things. First, we spoke to some current and former Robinhood interviewers in our community. Then we cross-referenced all the anecdotes we heard with Glassdoor data AND our own data-set of mock interviews. Based on all of the above, here are the types of questions you’re likely to encounter:

System Design

These questions will usually revolve around Robinhood’s own product, or adjacent/related products.

Common system design questions at Robinhood include:

• Build Twitter
• Design stock exchange
• Design a new feature for Robinhood
• Build Google Docs

How Robinhood Makes Hiring Decisions

Robinhood uses a hiring committee to make decisions, except in cases where there is a low volume of candidates for a role. In the event there is a hiring committee, those who participated in the interview directly will come together to discuss and review performance, before coming to an agreement on hire or no hire.