I applied online. I interviewed at Nextdoor in May 2026
Average interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Nextdoor in Jan 2025
Interview
Recruiter Screening and two technical interviews. The recruiter screening was mostly about my experience and one technical round focused on DSA (more specifically trees) and the other was recommendation systems and basics of ML.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
given a parent-child comment history, create a tree
first is hr call 30 mins, then 1h general coding and 1h ml coding, if passing, there will be another 1.5h interview for genereal coding and hebavior question. The hr call is mainly for introducing the interview process and checking interest,
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Tree traversal questions were mostly LeetCode medium level, focusing on classic BFS and DFS patterns without heavy backtracking. The emphasis was on implementing standard traversals cleanly, understanding when to use iterative vs recursive approaches, and handling common variations like level-order processing or simple tree properties.
The ML and system design portion focused primarily on recommender systems, along with fundamental machine learning theory. This included discussing how to design a recommendation pipeline end-to-end, tradeoffs between different approaches, and demonstrating a solid grasp of core concepts like model evaluation, overfitting, and basic algorithms.
Round 1: Backend Coding(1h) + ML coding(1h)
Backend Coding: A non-leetcode question with regard to hashmap and recursion
ML coding: Given a dataset, build a pipeline from data preprocessing to model training to evaluation