Waymo Coding Interview Questions
These are the 10 Waymo coding interview questions AceOffer has reconstructed from candidate reports, sorted by how often each was reported. Shortest Path on Chess Board (BFS) leads at 3×. Every question shows when it was last reported; the catalog refreshes monthly.
Key facts
- •10 distinct coding questions indexed
- •21 candidate reports across those questions
- •Most reported: Shortest Path on Chess Board (BFS) — 3× (last seen April 2026)
- •Refreshed monthly · last updated August 2026
Which Waymo rounds ask coding questions?
Waymo draws coding questions from the rounds below. Counts are distinct questions, not times asked.
Most reported: Shortest Path on Chess Board (BFS) — 3×
Most reported: Custom String Sort by Character Order — 2×
Which Waymo coding questions get asked most?
Sorted by candidate-report frequency. Click any question for the full breakdown.
| Question | Round | Reported | Last seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shortest Path on Chess Board (BFS) Given a fixed-size chess board, find the shortest path between two positions (e.g., for a knight or similar chess piece). You must… | Phone Screen | 3× | April 2026 |
| Run Length Encoding Problems Given a run-length encoded string (e.g., the array {'B','A','A','E','E','E','C'} is encoded as the string "B1A2E3C1"), implement the following using only the encoded… | Phone Screen | 2× | March 2026 |
| ETA / Shortest Path Calculation on Map Given a map represented as a graph of nodes (semantic map nodes) with weighted edges representing distances or travel times between nodes,… | Phone Screen | 2× | May 2026 |
| K-Means Clustering Implementation Given a 2D array of coordinate points where each element is [row, col], and an integer k representing the number of clusters,… | Phone Screen | 2× | October 2025 |
| CSV Data Processing and Formatting Given a CSV-formatted string (header row + data rows, e.g. "col1,col2,col3,col4\nvalue1,value2,value3,value4\n"), design and implement a function in pure Python (no external packages… | Phone Screen | 2× | April 2026 |
| Custom String Sort by Character Order Given two input strings: order and target. The order string defines a custom character ordering (similar to the alien dictionary problem). Sort… | Coding | 2× | March 2026 |
| Binary Search Optimization Problem Given a two-column table where: the text content of both columns is known, the total table width is fixed, and the column… | Coding | 2× | April 2026 |
| Debug Coding (numpy/tensor/distributed) The interviewer provides pre-written buggy code involving numpy arrays, tensor operations, and distributed computing concepts. The candidate must read and understand the… | Coding | 2× | June 2026 |
| Largest Rectangle Area in Histogram (Variant) A variant of the classic 'Largest Rectangle in Histogram' problem, but instead of finding the largest rectangle under a histogram (which uses… | Coding | 2× | April 2026 |
| Graph Search / BFS / DFS Coding Waymo coding rounds consistently feature graph search problems (BFS and/or DFS). The specific problem is typically novel and not seen in standard… | Coding | 2× | April 2026 |
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