Tesla Software Engineer: Codility OA, a React infinite scroll screen, an onsite with Trapping Rain Water, an OTA fleet update LLD and a telemetry pipeline, then Evidence of Excellence

Recruiter Screen

First was a recruiter screen. She covered logistics, levelling and compensation and told me about the role, and let me ask questions at the end.

Hiring Manager

Next was a call with the hiring manager. It started out friendly and casual like a chat and then it became mostly behavioral questions and some technical questions from my resume on what I had worked on in my past jobs.

Coding Assessment

Next was the coding assessment. 90 mins on Codility answering 3 DSA problems:

The first was find the minimum number of characters to delete from a string so that each character appears a unique number of times.

Then a SQL one which was a question to get records from two tables using joins.

Last was when given a binary string, calculate the minimum steps to reach zero.

Technical Phone Screen

This was a live coding round on CoderPad in React. I was allowed to use docs. The question was to implement infinite scrolling on an ever-growing list of items.

Onsite Loop

This was 4 rounds: DSA, LLD, HLD and behavioral. The DSA round was 2 questions. I can't remember the graphs one exactly but the other was to calculate trapped rain water which I had done here and knew once I saw it. LLD was to design the class hierarchy, state machine, and rollback logic for an over-the-air fleet update manager. System Design was to build a real time fleet telemetry pipeline for their cars. Behavioral round they asked for examples of how I overcame problems in the past and how I reached my solutions.

Evidence of Excellence Round

Immediately after the loop, the recruiter asked me to send on a 2 page write-up detailing my most significant technical achievement. I had read online about the Evidence of Excellence round so was expecting this at the end.