Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at YouTube with 3.4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 79% positive. To compare, the company-average is 69.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 35 days to get hired, when considering 41 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at YouTube overall takes an average of 26 days.
Common stages of the interview process at YouTube as a Software Engineer according to 41 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 44%
One on one interview: 21%
Skills test: 18%
Presentation: 5%
Group panel interview: 4%
Background check: 4%
Personality test: 3%
Other: 1%
Drug test: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at YouTube (San Bruno, CA) in May 2010
Interview
A Youtube recruiter somehow obtained my resume and called me up to schedule a phone interview. The phone interview went quite smoothly - it consisted of a few background questions, some broad technical questions, and some more specific programming questions. For the last part, we used a shared GoogleDoc, such that I was able to type out my answers.
I was flown out to the Youtube campus (they paid) and put up in a really nice hotel with a group of ~30 total candidates (for what it's worth, 90% of these were graduate students). We had a day-long group tour, including four 1-on-1 interviews, finishing with a dinner at a 5-star hotel restaurant.
The 1-on-1 interviews all had at least one technical question, but the rest of the content varied depending on the interviewer. Some asked questions about spam prevention, others about memory allocation. There were no questions like "how many pennies can you stack end-to-end to the moon?"
It's been almost a year, so I can't remember too many specific questions.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Implement a malloc-like function such that it only returns pointers evenly divisible by N (presumably some power of 2). Use as little overhead as possible. Implement the corresponding free() function.
It was a 3 round interview process with 2 technical rounds and 1 HR round. I was mostly asked DSA focused questions. Trees, heap, graphs and sliding window were mostly stressed for me.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Trees, heap, graphs and sliding window were mostly stressed for me.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at YouTube in Oct 2024
Interview
Long and slow. There were four rounds of interviews spanning over a month and they don't get back to you quickly. The interviews themselves were ok and took an hour each.
The interview process was demanding as they asked several questions about my masters degree thesis and on my research projects, which were challenging to remember as I had done these more than 7 years ago.