I interviewed with Nvidia for a Backend Compiler Engineer position after attending their campus day, where I spent 4 hours networking and expressing interest in compiler roles to recruiters.

The first round was with a senior manager. We started with a topological sort coding question that naturally evolved into an engaging conversation about its applications in automatic differentiation and dataflow analysis. The interview ended up being predominantly theoretical without actual coding, but the technical discussion was deep.

In the second round, despite some difficulties due to accents, we covered pointer analysis, dependence analysis, and architectural considerations behind compiler optimizations.

I received a rejection email very early the next morning.

Why compilers do loop unrolling?