Indeed Coding Interview Questions: Coding, Search Systems and Data

Indeed, the job site with headquarters in Austin and Stamford, has been owned by Japan's Recruit Holdings since 2012 and describes its mission as helping people get jobs. Candidates consistently report a live Karat coding screen first, then an onsite with a long solo programming exercise and a code-review round, a mix that is unusual among large consumer sites. This page covers what Indeed builds and who it hires, the process candidates commonly report, the technical depth the teams care about, representative problem types, what interviewers score, and a three-week prep plan.

What Indeed builds and who it hires

Indeed's engineers build job search and recommendations, the employer side (posting jobs, sponsored listings and applicant screening), résumé and profile tools, and the data and machine-learning systems that match job seekers with jobs. Indeed's engineering blog says the first version of job search, in 2004, was built on Lucene, the Java search library, and Indeed engineers have described most of their infrastructure as Java. In July 2025 Recruit announced about 1,300 job cuts across Indeed and Glassdoor and said Glassdoor's operations would be integrated into Indeed, so team structures have been changing.

• Search and matching engineers: retrieval, ranking and relevance, mostly in Java.
• Employer and monetization engineers: job posting, sponsored jobs and applicant tools.
• Data and machine learning engineers: recommendations, pipelines and experimentation.
• Web and mobile engineers: the job seeker and employer apps.

What the process tends to look like

Processes differ by team, level and office and change over time, so treat this as the common shape candidates report and confirm the specifics with your recruiter.

Search, matching and the practical rounds

The programming exercise. Candidates describe working alone against a written problem, often related to jobs or matching, where code that does not compile or fails tests counts against you. Get a simple, correct version passing first, then improve it, and leave five minutes for the write-up on complexity and next steps. Our take-home assignment guide has a checklist that suits this round.

Code review. You comment on someone else's change as you would on a teammate's pull request. Lead with correctness bugs, then missing tests and error handling, then naming and style, and say which comments block the merge. Candidates report behavioral follow-ups about how you communicate and prevent errors.

Search and ranking. Job search is retrieval plus ranking: an inverted index, filters for location, salary and job type, freshness when postings expire, deduplicating the same job posted on many sites, and ranking by relevance and the chance someone applies. Our Elasticsearch interview questions cover the indexing vocabulary.

A two-sided marketplace. Every design has two users, job seekers and employers. Explain what success means for each, how you would test a ranking change with an experiment, and how you would keep fraudulent postings out of results. If the Karat format is new to you, read our Karat interview guide.

Representative problem types

These are the kinds of problems candidates describe, not a leaked question list. Practice the category, not the exact question.

1. Reverse a string in place, find the first non-repeated character or group anagrams.
2. Implement a cache whose entries expire after a time limit.
3. Find a shortest path or connected regions in a grid with BFS or DFS.
4. Insert into a sorted linked structure while keeping it ordered.
5. Build a small job search API that filters and ranks postings.
6. Deduplicate job postings that arrive from several sources with slightly different text.
7. Design job search or job alerts for millions of users.

What interviewers score

• Working code: a solution that runs, handles edge cases and is readable by the next engineer.
• Practical judgment: the trade-offs you name and the simplest design that meets the requirement.
• Product sense: understanding who the user is and what failure looks like for them.
• Ownership: examples where you shipped, measured and fixed things yourself.

The behavioral side

Technical rounds decide most outcomes, but every Indeed loop also asks about how you work. Prepare a short story for each of these, with a result and what you learned:

• Something you shipped end to end. Cover the user problem, your decisions, what you measured and what you would change.
• A disagreement with a teammate. Show how you made the decision on evidence and kept the relationship.
• Why this company? Connect its product and engineering problems to the work you want to do next.

Structures and sample answers for the common questions are in our software engineer behavioral answers guide.

A three-week prep plan

1. Week 1: speed on easy and medium problems for the Karat screen: strings, hash maps, BFS and DFS, sorting and binary search, three a day under a 20-minute limit, plus quick answers on object-oriented fundamentals from our object-oriented programming questions.
2. Week 2: two full mock programming exercises of 90 minutes each, building a small feature from a written spec with tests that must pass, followed by a written note on complexity and improvements.
3. Week 3: review three open-source pull requests and write comments ranked by severity, sketch a job search design end to end, and prepare two résumé deep-dive stories.

For practice lists, use LeetCode company-tagged questions and the NeetCode 150 roadmap; for design rounds, read system design building blocks; and compare the practical style of Stripe.

Where CoPilot Interview fits

Most of a Indeed loop is spoken: you explain an approach, defend a trade-off and talk through your past work. CoPilot Interview is an AI interview assistant whose free AI mock interview builds technical and behavioral questions from your résumé and the job description, reads them aloud and scores each spoken answer out of ten, so you can rehearse the explanation as well as the code. The free plan gives 15 minutes a day of live help in sessions of up to 15 minutes, with AI mock interviews included. Online assessments and many coding rounds forbid outside help, so practice beforehand and follow your employer's rules on the day.

Disclosure: CoPilot Interview is our product, so weigh what we say about it accordingly.

Frequently asked questions

What programming language should I use in a Indeed interview?

Indeed's back end is widely described as Java, with JavaScript on the web and Python in data work. Karat and the onsite rounds let you choose, and one candidate reported choosing the language for the code review too. Pick the language you can compile and test fastest, because the programming exercise must run.

Does Indeed send an online assessment?

Indeed usually starts with a live Karat interview rather than an unattended online assessment, as candidates describe it. Some report being offered a retake of the Karat session; confirm the current format and policy with your recruiter.

What is the Indeed programming exercise?

Candidates describe a solo round of roughly 90 to 105 minutes in which you solve a practical problem, with interviewers available only for clarifications. The code has to compile and pass tests, and afterward you note its time and space complexity and what you would improve.

How should I prepare for Indeed coding questions?

Drill fast, correct easy and medium problems for the Karat screen, then rehearse a 90-minute solo build where the code must compile and pass tests. Practice reviewing pull requests you did not write, and prepare to discuss search, ranking and matching for a two-sided job marketplace.

Can I use AI tools in a Indeed interview?

Only if the instructions you receive say so. Online assessments and live coding rounds generally forbid outside help, and some companies now state their AI policy in the invitation. Use AI to practice beforehand, and follow your employer's rules.