The Trade Desk Software Engineer interview experience

After that, I was assigned a HackerRank coding exercise and told there wasn’t a hard due date, though it clearly felt like they expected something within a week or two.

My exercise was a timed, four-hour problem focused on set-associative cache optimization. I picked Java, and that choice immediately turned into friction because the exercise assumed code in a single file. Java’s structure worked against me: scoping and how types should be declared became a big headache, especially around nested/static structure and generics. I did get the interface and the intended solution concept right