Pure Storage interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Pure Storage software engineering interview across 3 levels and 13 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Pure Storage salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Engineer Intern (Summer / 6-month, Bengaluru)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 3-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-6 weeks · Cooldown: No India intern cooldown policy reported.

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (HackerRank)

    Assessment · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: 01 Matrix (Multi-Source BFS Shortest Path) — Given an R x C grid of 0s and 1s, return a grid where each cell holds its distance to the nearest 0 (moving in 4 directions). Seed a BFS queue with ALL zero-cells at distance 0 and expand simultaneously (multi-source BFS).

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview 1 (Data Structures & Coding)

    Phone · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Maximum Sum Subarray of Size K (Fixed-Window Sliding Window) — Given an integer array of length n and a window size k, find the maximum sum of any contiguous subarray of exactly k elements. Solve in O(n) by sliding a fixed-size window: add the incoming element and subtract the outgoing one instead of recomputing each window.

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 2 (Algorithms / Concurrency)

    Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design HashSet (Implement a Set with Default Structures) — Implement a Set from scratch (no built-in set/map libraries) supporting insert(x), remove(x), and contains(x)/lookup(x), each optimized toward O(1), plus iterator(f(x)) and clear(). Use bucket-based separate chaining (or, as the interviewer often steers, a sparse-set with a rolling timestamp so clear() is O(1)); the interviewer then pushes on optimizing latency of every operation.

  4. Round 3: Managerial / Behavioral Round

    Behavioral · ~30-45 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Software Engineer (SWE / new-grad to mid, incl. MTS-1) — Bangalore

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: 3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: 6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (coding + CS-fundamentals MCQs)

    Assessment · ~60-75 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Group Anagrams — Given an array of strings, group the anagrams together. Two strings are anagrams if one is a rearrangement of the other's characters. Return the groups in any order.

  2. Round 1: Recruiter / HR Screen

    Phone · 30-45 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  3. Round 2: Technical Coding Round(s) — concurrency + data-structure implementation

    Onsite · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Find Peak Element — A peak element is strictly greater than its neighbors. Given a 0-indexed integer array where nums[-1] and nums[n] are treated as negative infinity, return the index of any peak element in O(log n).

  4. Round 3: Managerial / Behavioral Round

    Behavioral · 45 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Senior Software Engineer / MTS-2 — Bangalore

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: 6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / HR Screen

    Phone · 30-45 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (may be waived for senior/experienced)

    Assessment · ~60-75 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Expression Add Operators — Given a string of digits and a target value, insert the binary operators '+', '-', and '*' (respecting operator precedence, no leading zeros in any operand) between the digits so the resulting expression evaluates to the target. Return all such expressions.

  3. Round 2: Technical Coding — concurrency & DS implementation

    Onsite · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Palindromic Substrings — Given a string, count how many substrings are palindromes. Each single character counts, and different start/end index ranges are counted separately even if the substring content repeats.

  4. Round 3: Systems / Design Round

    System_design · 45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Distributed File / Object Storage System — Design a distributed file storage system that supports file upload and retrieval with sharding, redundancy, and recovery. Address metadata management, data placement, replication vs erasure coding, consistency vs availability (CAP) trade-offs, write-latency optimization, node health monitoring, and eliminating single points of failure.

  5. Round 4: Managerial / Behavioral Round

    Behavioral · 45 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

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