Block

Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California

August 14, 2025

Positive ExperienceNo Response

Process

Phone screen and then a full day of interviews.

There were:

3 pair programming challenges
A system design review
A prior experience interview

There was also an onsite lunch with a person from the company.

Questions

To design a hotel booking system.

Pick any part (backend, frontend, database, API, etc.) and deep dive into that, explaining the decisions along the way.

Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 59 interview experiences for the Block Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.

Success Rate

25%

Pass Rate

Block's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive56%

Neutral20%

Negative24%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Block's Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.

Block Interview Questions

Rotating the Box

Medium

Simulate a box tilting to the right, causing stones to fall until they hit obstacles or the floor. Re-arrange the characters in a given grid to reflect the resulting state of the box.

ArraysTwo Pointers

Squirrel Simulation

Medium

Imagine a squirrel trying to collect nuts efficiently. Find the minimum distance the squirrel must travel to collect all nuts and bring them to a tree, given the locations of the squirrel, tree, and nuts.

ArraysGreedy Algorithms

Word Break

Medium

Determine if a given string can be segmented into a space-separated sequence of words from a dictionary. You are given a string and a dictionary of words; can you break the string down using words from the dictionary?

ArraysStringsDynamic Programming