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NVIDIA Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews

Getting the Interview  48 Interviews

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Interview Experience  43 Ratings

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48 interview experiences Back to all interview questions
Updated Mar 28, 2013
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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Interviewed in San Jose, CA Sep 2009 – Reviewed Jan 12, 2011

Interview Details – I was contacted by Nvidia's recruiter. They first scheduled a one-on-one interview, followed by two phone interviews [second gentlemen was calling out of Germany ]. The phone interviews were straightforward with one or two "trick" questions. The one-on-one interview was also straightforward but the gentelmen who I was talking with appeared to be very cocky and somewhat rude. At the end of the interview he went on to comment on my coding skills, which he described as OK for someone with my experience. This is considering that I solved his problem correctly and was invited to do two more phone interviews.

Interview Questions

  • Write and aligned malloc() that gets memory size needed and an alignment mask as its arguements. Write a free() function to go with the aligned malloc that takes only the pointer to the allocated chunk of memory.   View Answers (2)
  • Write a macro to which you can pass a name of a structure and a name of one of its fields and get a relative offset of this field within the structure.   View Answers (2)

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

Accepted Offer – Interviewed in Santa Clara, CA Nov 2008 – Reviewed Apr 13, 2010

Interview Details – Sent my resume over internet. Received feedback for a 15 minute phone screen in about one week. They didn't call me actually on that day, but later they asked for a 45 minute technical interview. They sent out onsite interview notice within 3 days. Onsite was a full day I met eight person, 45 minutes each round. Offer was extended within 4 days after onsite.

Interview Question – I can't expose the details as it is confidential. But i would the most difficult question is some low level design questions - need complete familiarity with related subjects and combine them together.   Answer Question

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Interviewed in Sep 2009 – Reviewed Nov 10, 2009

Interview Details – Applied online and around two weeks later, they arranged a phone interview.
The phone interview is technical. Pretty basic C and OS question: multi-threading, semaphore, memory alignment, etc. Question about previous project experience. etc.
But I was not quite ready at that time. It didn't take much time and I failed.

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Interviewed in Austin, TX Aug 2007 – Reviewed Oct 12, 2009

Interview Details – My first interview was over the phone. It was a general inquiry into what I was interested in so they could see where I may fit in the company. It lasted no longer than 30 minutes. I was told at the end that they were going to give me a small assignment to test my programming skills, which I was e-mailed shortly thereafter and told I had two days to implement two C functions. The "homework" was not difficult but also not trivial.

I had a second phone interview with an employee local to the area in which I was applying. We spoke for perhaps 45 minutes, again addressing where my talents and interests would best fit with the company's needs. There may have been a few short technical questions such as "What is polymorphism?" just to establish that I really knew my stuff. The interviewer told me he'd get me an in person interview with a team in the particular development area in which I had the most interest.

I reviewed the (somewhat esoteric) material that I had studied in graduate school in preparation for this unique in-person interview. When I arrived, I soon discovered that I was not interviewing with the group I was told I would be, and instead was partnered with a device driver developer. He proceeded to ask me many technical questions focusing mostly in low level C programming and some questions on programming theory, which I was completely unprepared for. The questions were pretty standard interview questions and were not that difficult. The interviewer was somewhat rude and impatient when I started struggling with one of the programming questions. This miscommunication somewhat soured the otherwise positive interviewing experience for me. All other interviewers and HR persons were very amicable and enjoyable to speak with.

Interview Questions

  • Write a malloc and free function that forces the buffer to start on a byte aligned boundary. (Asked as a homework assignment, not during an interview)   Answer Question
  • Write a C function that reverses the words in a string without using any memory overhead.   View Answer
  • Question on producer/consumer theory and asked to analyze a specific model case.   Answer Question

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

Accepted Offer – Interviewed in May 2007 – Reviewed Sep 24, 2009

Interview Details – The interview in general wasn't that challenging. It was an initial phone call, then I was invited on campus to do an on-site interview. The interview lasted for around 5 hours ranging from experience questions, technical questions, behavioral questions, and general talk. They were very friendly and nice to talk to.

Interview Questions

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Interviewed in Tokyo (Japan) Feb 2012 – Reviewed Mar 25, 2013

Interview Details – First round was telephonic interview
They mostly asked question related to data structure, kernel internals and different languages

Interview Question – complexity of balanced binary tree if hash table is used   Answer Question

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Reviewed Jan 5, 2013

Interview Details – HR was fast in setting up phone interview. Phone interview was mostly about the past projects and domain knowledge of the projects followed by basic C programming questions. Follow up second phone interview with appropriate team was setup that was bit more technical. Finally onsite interview was setup.

Interview Question – GNU Tool chain question - how linker resolved dynamic binding?   Answer Question

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Reviewed Dec 11, 2012

Interview Details – NVIDIA came to my universitys engineering fair. They asked about my academic background and then gave me a set of short problems to solve. They told me that they would contact me if they were interested but they did not.
NVIDIA was not amongst my top choices so I did not prepare for these kinds of questions and I didn't expect them to contact me afterwards.

Interview Question – The problems involved reversing the bits of a given int and optimizing a long if-else tree.   Answer Question

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Interviewed in Aug 2012 – Reviewed Oct 22, 2012

Interview Details – My resume was submitted to HR by a former colleague who works there. I was contacted the next week about several opportunities in several different groups. Initially I was set up to have a phone interview but that was changed to an in-person interview at the Santa Clara site. The interview was with an engineering group manager and we spent close to an hour going over details in my resume. Overall, it was a very pleasant experience. There was a follow-up phone interview with a different engineering manager. This one was pretty similar to the first one (mostly focusing on details in my resume and my past experience). I was contacted after this interview to schedule an on-site technical interview, which was supposed to last approximately 45 minutes. I ended up not going in for the last interview... because I accepted an offer at a different company.

Interview Question – There weren't any questions that were difficult or unexpected... Mainly the questions focused on my previous experience and points listed on my resume.   Answer Question

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Software Engineer at NVIDIA

No Offer – Interviewed in Sep 2012 – Reviewed Oct 9, 2012

Interview Details – A brief, no-nonsense technical presentation.
Aptitude test- 4 sections: Quantitative ability, OS, data structures, C and C++
1 technical interview and 1 HR interview
There were sectional cut-offs and an overall cut-off for the test. As a result, very few people cleared it.

Interview Question – how do you implement a sizeof operator without using the sizeof operator   View Answers (2)

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