I interviewed with the PayPal Partner Integrations Team.

My interview process started with a recruiter call, followed by a phone screen conducted via a third party called Karat. The phone screen included two medium-difficulty LeetCode-level questions. The Karat engineers seemed quite talented and professional.

My onsite experience, however, was unfortunately very negative and insulting. Beyond the lack of diversity, the major issue was the knowledge base of the employees interacting with me on the PayPal Partner Integrations team. They didn't seem to understand basic concepts like constant time complexity, code optimization, performance techniques, and fundamental data structures/algorithms.

One of the interviewers, at an MTS level, asked me a LeetCode medium question that was a simple O(n) sliding window problem. I solved it in 15 minutes. I doubt he understood terms like linear time, polynomial, or exponential time complexity. Can you imagine his follow-up question to the sliding window problem? It was, "Can you solve this with dynamic programming by creating a matrix?" I was amazed by his technical approach and then cross-questioned him. "How would we solve this with DP? Won't it be O(n^2) with this matrix?" He answered, "Yes, but with a matrix, you can simply go diagonally, and it will be cleaner. DP solutions can help in solving many complex problems without data structures." He clearly had no idea what he was talking about, as the diagonal matrix solution was incorrect.

I agree that tech in the Bay Area has a large Indian presence, and they are often very talented. I was surprised by this poor demonstration from the PayPal Partner Integrations team. After the interview, I looked up their LinkedIn profiles and found that some were Indians who came directly to the US on H1B visas, having previously worked as contractors.

I highly advise against joining the PayPal Partner Integrations team if you are seeking learning opportunities and skill growth. Join this team only if you are rejected by all major tech companies and other cool startups in the Bay Area. Basically, consider this team at PayPal your last option.

Simple LeetCode medium questions based on trees, sliding window, and one design question.