I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Tinder (Los Angeles, CA) in May 2017
Interview
I've had the misfortune to interview here twice. Background - I'm a recent college grad with 1 year experience in the industry.
First time:
- Make you code a multiplayer tic tac toe game with NodeJS.
- After spending the time and tests to make this, they invite you onsite. They lock you in a room for 2 hours and give you a project to build in the onsite. Very bad as I was expecting ds/algo/system design questions because I felt I did the project part already. This felt like a cop out because I was expecting a traditional whiteboard interview from a company as big as Tinder. An onsite project like this is HARD for typical junior level developers.
A year later, second time, I aced the phone screen in record time. I was applying for a NodeJS Web Developer position in the Bay area and made it very clear to the interviewer that I wanted the web development position. And yet got a call from the recruiter the next day saying that I did not pass my interview to the Infra team in LA. WTF?! I never applied to the Infra team in LA! I tried correcting her and she did not budge in her decision. But I let it go as I received multiple offers already. Screw this company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Second interview:
1) A shuffled set contains unique numbers except one of the numbers appears twice. Find the number that appears twice. (Funny enough the interviewer had a custom random shuffler function to shuffle the set. But his shuffler function was not truly random as he would randomly pick indexes from 0--length of set and swap but this could pick the same indexes twice. Its technically buggy code, but I didn't dare mention something like that in an interview. Goes to show how "strong" the developers working in Tinder are. It also explains the numerous buggy user experience on the app)
2) Merge part in merge sort
Thank you for sharing your experiences. Our apologies for the miscommunication. We'll use the feedback to continue to shape the best candidate experiences. We appreciate your review and wish you the best on your job search!
Other Software Engineer interview reviews for Tinder
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Tinder in Sept 2025
Interview
-Needed to sign an NDA prior to the recruiter first round interview
-Recruiter first round interview was an Zoom call (audio only) for 30 minutes
-Discussed the role and company briefly, but mostly wanted to know about previous work experience and if there was alignment.
Phone Screen:
With HM
1. Prev project experience: Most challenging project.
2. Coding: Given a matrix of size Mx n, with 0s and 1s write a program to return number of islands , emphasis on clean code design.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Phone Screen:
With HM
1. Prev project experience: Most challenging project.
2. Coding: Given a matrix of size Mx n, with 0s and 1s write a program to return number of islands , emphasis on clean code design.
I applied online. I interviewed at Tinder (Los Angeles, CA) in Sept 2023
Interview
The process is as follows: Start with an HR phone call, then a coding session (1 hour) with one or more engineers, continue with a long virtual onsite with several sessions (3.5-4 hours), lastly hiring manager (30 mins).
