Plaid Software Engineer interview experience

What’s been communicated to me is that I’ll get a problem I can look up and research online while I work through it, which already felt a bit different from the usual timed coding setup.

Before that, I’d also been told my first round would be two separate one-hour sessions, and that it wasn’t going to be “LeetCode-style.” Even though the topics weren’t spelled out, the structure alone made me adjust how I thought about the interview—less about memorized patterns and more about reasoning through a prompt across multiple blocks of time. Overall, I felt moderately prepared: I knew the format,