Frontend Engineer · Online Assessment · Coding

IBM — Frontend Engineer ❌ Failed

Level: Intern

Round: Online Assessment · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: Arrays, CSS

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2025-08-15

Got offer: False

Summary

I applied for an AI Engineer intern position at IBM Research and received an automated online assessment (OA) on HackerRank. The OA consisted of two questions in 60 minutes. The assessment was labeled 'IBM US Standard - Front End', which was confusing since the role wasn't front-end focused.

Details

The first question was a standard coding problem:

Find the length of the longest bitonic subarray. Given an array of positive integers, find the length of the longest bitonic subarray. A bitonic subarray has an index i where the elements from the beginning to index i are increasing and the elements from index i to the end are decreasing.

Example: [24, 3, 8, 17, 54, 26, 56, 87], the longest bitonic subarray is [3, 8, 17, 54, 26], with length 5.

The second question was a front-end coding question. I was provided with index.html and instructions.md and asked to write styles.css to match the required UI layout. I struggled with this question since I lack CSS skills, and only have experience from building a personal website years ago. I spent around 45 minutes but couldn't fully pass the test cases before the time ran out.

My approach to the first question:

1. I analyzed the problem and identified the need to find the peak of each potential bitonic subarray.
2. I attempted to implement the solution using a brute-force approach, but this proved inefficient.
3. I recognized the potential for dynamic programming to store previously computed lengths.

Key insights:

• The front-end focus of the assessment was unexpected, given the AI Engineer role.
• My CSS skills need improvement.