Course Hero Backend Engineer interview experience

One take-home coding task asked me to extract structured fields—department, course number, year, and season—from messy inputs such as “CS111 Fall 2016” and variations like “CS:111 16 F.” After that, the technical interview continued the same theme by extending the logic.

In the live coding part, I was asked to handle a scenario where a user enters the same course (department + course number) multiple times. The goal was to avoid retrieving duplicates and to sort results using two criteria—year and department when years matched. The interviewer basically built on the same data-processing idea