The 30 second answer
The reported loop had five rounds. A phone screen with linked list coding, CAP and ACID, and a project walkthrough. Then a ninety-minute live build of two APIs in a Spring Boot codebase they shared a week before. A code and testing round. An AI and machine learning round. And a managerial round. So I'd drill linked lists, set up their project early, and practise building a clean, tested API out loud.
According to the candidate's report, the rounds were:
- Phone screen. Linked list coding (reverse a list iteratively and recursively, find the middle node, reverse in groups of k), the CAP theorem and ACID properties, and a walkthrough of a past project. The linked list and CAP questions are below on this page.
- Live API build, about 90 minutes. A Spring Boot project was shared about a week earlier so the candidate could get it running locally. In the round, the candidate built two APIs inside Intuit's codebase while four engineers watched. The discussion covered pagination, separating the data and service layers, global exception handling, security and rate limiting, and the reasons behind each design choice.
- Code and testing round. Reverse the words of a string in place, analyse the complexity of a given loop, configure a local LLM endpoint through a properties file, handle a request with an oversized page value (the part the candidate reported missing), debug a Java client, and design unit and integration tests.
- AI/ML round. Scheduled for 30 minutes, it ran about 45. Topics: how to tell when a model is trained enough, K-Means, finding similar images through vector embeddings, reinforcement learning, retrieval-augmented generation and agents, neural networks, and how the candidate uses AI in day-to-day work.
- Managerial round. Experience, ownership and motivation.
How to prepare. Get the shared project building and its tests passing on day one, then read it the way you would on a new team: the package structure, how an existing endpoint goes from controller to database, how errors and security are already handled, and how tests are written. In the live round, follow the codebase's existing conventions instead of introducing your own style. For the phone screen, the linked list problems below are worth writing by hand until the pointer moves are automatic.