My interview with Nvidia consisted of a phone interview, a programming test, being flown out for a day of interviews on-site, and then being flown back out to interview with a second team.

I applied for the job through a friend who works there. After interviewing with his manager, I was asked to complete a programming question via e-mail within 30 minutes and send him the response. This question was designed to test my knowledge of memory management and the C programming language.

All arrangements were simple and handled over e-mail with the recruiting coordinator. They made reservations for the rental car, hotel, and airline tickets. I had to pay and submit the hotel and rental car for reimbursement, along with gas and meal charges.

I interviewed with seven people during my first trip out and was asked a variety of technical questions, from programming to systems architecture. I was also given a wide opportunity to learn about the company, the product I would be working on, and what the culture is like at Nvidia.

I was declined an offer from this team based primarily on the time frame I would be available and the fact that they were looking for someone to start almost immediately and ramp up quickly. However, I received an offer to interview with a second team within the company that was much more established.

For my second interview, I met with three individuals from the new team, and it was very similar to the first time. There were plenty of technical questions and opportunity to ask about other aspects of the company.

I would highly recommend being familiar with C, developing on multi-core systems, and having a very good foundation in UNIX systems programming.

Implement a linked list structure and insert routine in C. Make it thread-safe.

Implement a function for compare and swap in C. Use this function to implement linked list insertion. How could you take advantage of hardware caching to implement this?

Implement a reader-writer locking system.

Implement the function strstr, which returns a pointer to the first occurrence of one string within another.

Implement a function that takes a list of signed integers and looks for the consecutive subset with the highest sum.