Tesla Senior SWE On-Site Expierence
Question Details
Location - Fremont, CA
Round 1 Phone Screen https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/description/
On-Site **Round 2 :Coding 1 1. https://leetcode.com/problems/letter-combinations-of-a-phone-number/description/ 2. https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-elements/
Round 3 Coding 2 1. https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-elements/description/ 2. // Given an input string s and a pattern p, implement regular...
Full Details
Location - Fremont, CA
**
Round 1 Phone Screen**
https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/description/
On-Site
Round 2 :Coding 1
1. https://leetcode.com/problems/letter-combinations-of-a-phone-number/description/
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-elements/
**
Round 3 Coding 2**
1. https://leetcode.com/problems/top-k-frequent-elements/description/
2.
// Given an input string s and a pattern p, implement regular expression matching with support for \'.\' and \'*\' where:
// - . Matches any single character.\u200B\u200B\u200B\u200B
// - * Matches zero or more of the preceding element.
// The matching should cover the entire input string (not partial).
//
**Example 1**:
//
**Input**: s = "aa", p = "a"
//
**Output**: false
//
**Explanation**: "a" does not match the entire string "aa".
//
**Example 2**:
//
**Input**: s = "aa", p = "a*"
//
**Output**: true
//
**Explanation**: \'*\' means zero or more of the preceding element, \'a\'. Therefore, by repeating \'a\' once, it becomes "aa".
//
**Example 3**:
//
**Input**: s = "ab", p = ".*"
//
**Output**: true
//
**Explanation**: ".*" means "zero or more (*) of any character (.)".
//
**Constraints**:
// - 1 <= s.length <= 20
// - 1 <= p.length <= 20
// - s contains only lowercase English letters.
// - p contains only lowercase English letters, \'.\', and \'*\'.
// - It is guaranteed for each appearance of the character \'*\', there will be a previous valid character to match.
**
Round 4 Product **
Product manager asking product and general questions. DIscussion on style of work
**
Round 5 System Design**
MVC model, API Design, Database Design
// Suppose you have a database schema with three tables: Employees, Departments, and Salaries.
// The Employees table stores information about employees, including their EmployeeID, Name, and DepartmentID.
// The Departments table contains information about different departments in the company, including their DepartmentID and DepartmentName.
// The Salaries table contains historical salary information for each employee, including their EmployeeID, Salary, and Date (when the salary was effective).
// Write an SQL query to find the top 3 departments with the highest average salary of employees
hired in the year 2023.
**
Round 6 Low Level Design**
SQL Queries and OOPS concepts and project discussion.
I
passed all the interviews, and recevied the offer.
About This Question
This is a reported interview question from a tesla interview for a pm role (senior level) during the phone screen round reported in 2024.
It covers the following topics: Sql, System Design, Strings, Heap .
Topics
More Tesla Interview Questions
About Tesla Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Tesla. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Tesla are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Tesla interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Tesla reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Tesla Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Tesla reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.