Adobe engineering hiring (Member of Technical Staff / MTS roles, plus specialized tracks like ML Engineer) runs as an interview loop rather than a single written test — a mix of DSA rounds, an LLD or HLD round depending on level and team, and a hiring-manager or director round that blends behavioral and architecture-trade-off discussion. The exact shape varies by role level and org (product engineering vs. ML), but the pattern below holds across recent (2025) candidate reports.
Typical Adobe engineering interview process
| Stage | What it tests | Typical length |
|---|---|---|
| DSA round(s) | 1–2 coding problems, commonly from graphs/trees, union-find, heaps, or DP | 45–60 min each |
| Design round (LLD and/or HLD) | A low-level class design or a higher-level system/architecture design, sometimes paired with a short coding warm-up | 45–60 min |
| Fundamentals deep dive | Language/CS internals — concurrency, memory management, DB internals — more common at experienced (CS1+) and C++-track levels | 45–60 min |
| Hiring manager / Director round | Resume and project discussion, architecture trade-off reasoning, and behavioral/culture-fit questions | 30–45 min |
Design rounds at Adobe lean toward unconventional, first-principles prompts — candidates report things like "design a water bottle" or "design a color-suggestion system" rather than only textbook LLD catalog items. Practice reasoning from scratch, not just recalling a memorized design.
Process varies by level and track. C++-track loops add rounds on memory management and language internals; ML-engineer loops replace a chunk of DSA with ML-pipeline and system-design prompts. Treat this table as the common pattern, not a guarantee of your exact loop.
Prepare each track on its own terms: DSA and Behavioral & Culture-Fit prep below.