Media.net interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Media.net software engineering interview across 3 levels and 15 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Media.net salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Development Engineer 1

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months

  1. Round 0: Online Coding Assessment

    Assessment · ~90 min · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Ad-budget knapsack: you have N candidate ad campaigns; campaign i costs c_i from your budget and is projected to earn v_i revenue. Given total budget B (B <= 10^4, N <= 10^3), pick a subset maximizing revenue. Input: N B, then N lines of c_i v_i. Output the max revenue.

  2. Round 1: Technical Round 1 - DSA + CS Fundamentals

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Peak click window: given N (up to 2*10^5) timestamps (ms) at which an ad received clicks, and a window length W, find the maximum number of clicks that fall in any half-open window [t, t+W). Expected O(n log n).

  3. Round 2: Technical Round 2 - Advanced DSA

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 5/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Balanced partition: given a string of ( and ) of length up to 5000, split it into the minimum number of contiguous substrings so each substring is balanced or can be made balanced by removing at most one character. Discuss states, then improve your O(n^3) to O(n^2).

  4. Round 3: Managerial + Design Discussion

    Other · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team

  5. Round 4: HR Round

    Behavioral · ~45 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Software Development Engineer 2

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~1-3 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter Screen

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: DSA Coding Round

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Merge ad-slot bookings: given N booking intervals [s, e) on a timeline (N <= 2*10^5), merge all overlapping or touching bookings and output the number of merged blocks and the total covered duration. Follow-up: how would you do it with bookings arriving as a stream?

  3. Round 2: Hiring Manager Round

    Onsite · ~60-90 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  4. Round 3: Technical Deep-Dive - Fundamentals + Design

    Onsite · ~90 min · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Why does a database use a B-Tree index instead of a binary search tree or a hash map? Walk through what happens on disk for a range query, then explain when a hash index wins and how you would index a 500M-row ad-events table for (campaign_id, day) lookups.

  5. Round 4: HR Discussion

    Behavioral · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Senior Software Engineer

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter Screen

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Coding Round

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Top-K campaigns: from a stream of (campaign_id, revenue) click events, return the K campaigns with highest total revenue at any point, with updates in O(log K) amortized. Discuss hash map + min-heap vs a balanced BST, then code it. Follow-up: make it safe for concurrent writers.

  3. Round 2: Low-Level Design / Machine Coding

    Onsite · ~90 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design Splitwise: users, groups, expenses with equal/exact/percentage split strategies, balance sheet per user, and a simplify-debts operation that minimizes the number of settlement transactions. Define classes and write the core expense-split flow.

  4. Round 3: System Design Round

    System_design · ~90 min · difficulty 5/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design the serving path of a contextual ad platform: given a page URL and user context, return the best ad in under 50 ms at 500K QPS. Cover candidate retrieval, ranking, multi-level caching, regional failover, and how you keep revenue counting accurate when a region goes down.

  5. Round 4: Director Round

    Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Other companies' interview processes

Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.