PayPal

Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience - San Jose, California

June 13, 2025

Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I had a 30-minute initial phone screening that mainly dealt with my previous experiences and what I can expect to work on at PayPal.

Following that, there were LeetCode-style questions for the first round.

Questions

Binary Tree and Two Pointers

This section will cover:

Binary trees
Two-pointer technique

Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 2 interview experiences for the PayPal Machine Learning Engineer role in San Jose, California.

Success Rate

Pass Rate

PayPal's interview process for their Machine Learning Engineer roles in San Jose, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive100%

Neutral0%

Negative0%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for PayPal's Machine Learning Engineer interview process in San Jose, California.

PayPal Interview Questions

Zigzag Conversion

Medium

Convert a given string into a zigzag pattern with a specified number of rows. Then read the characters row by row to return the converted string.

Strings

LRU Cache

Medium

Design a data structure that acts as a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache. Implement methods to get and put key-value pairs, evicting the least recently used entry when the cache is full.

Linked ListsArraysDynamic Programming

Word Search

Medium

Determine if a given word can be constructed from letters in a 2D board, where letters can be used horizontally or vertically. Each letter can only be used once in the word.

ArraysStringsRecursionGraphs