Cruise interview questions and how to prepare

1. Imagine you are designing the API for the in-car user interface to request a ride. What are the key endpoints, request/response payloads, and error handling strategies you would consider for a seamless and reliable user experience, especially considering real-time vehicle location and status updates?

   Software EngineerSystem DesignTests: evaluating the candidate's ability to design robust and scalable APIs for a real-time, mission-critical system.

2. A Cruise AV suddenly stops in the middle of an intersection, blocking traffic, and refuses to move. You are on-call. Walk me through your debugging process to identify the root cause, from initial logs to potential sensor fusion or prediction module failures. What tools and techniques would you employ?

   Software EngineerDebuggingTests: assessing the candidate's systematic debugging approach in a complex, safety-critical autonomous system.

3. Our prediction module estimates the future trajectories of other road users. How would you design a system to evaluate the performance of this module at scale, considering metrics like prediction accuracy, latency, and safety-critical event detection? How would you handle the vast amount of simulation and real-world data?

   Software EngineerSystem DesignTests: gauging the candidate's ability to design scalable evaluation systems for machine learning components in an autonomous driving context.

4. Write a Python function to simulate a simplified version of our perception system's object detection. Given a list of bounding boxes and their confidence scores, and a list of ground truth objects, calculate precision, recall, and F1-score for a given IoU threshold.

   Software EngineerCoding ReasoningTests: testing fundamental coding skills and understanding of core computer vision evaluation metrics.

5. You're tasked with optimizing the performance of our routing engine, which currently takes too long to calculate optimal routes for our fleet in dense urban environments. Describe how you would approach profiling and identifying bottlenecks, and suggest potential algorithmic or data structure improvements.

   Software EngineerSystem DesignTests: evaluating problem-solving skills and knowledge of optimization techniques for large-scale systems.

6. Describe a scenario where a software bug introduced a safety risk in an autonomous system. How would you ensure such a bug is caught early in the development lifecycle, considering unit testing, integration testing, and simulation?

   Software EngineerCoding ReasoningTests: assessing the candidate's understanding of software quality assurance and safety in critical systems.

72+ more Cruise-style questions are in the free library, each practiceable live with adaptive follow-ups and an honest scorecard. Start free.