Scale AI New Grad OA: Three Coding Problems

The OA arrived on May 29 and was completed on June 2. It wasn’t clear which role it belonged to because they had applied to several positions.

The OA lasted 95 minutes and had three questions.

The first was Minimize Adjacent Squared-Difference Cost with One Insertion.

The second was Maximum Distinct Values After Cross-Array Swaps. The goal was to maximize the number of different values in one array. One example had conflicting wording, but the shown arrays and answer both gave four distinct values.

The third was Minimum Falling Path Sum on a fixed 4 × 4 matrix. Larger rectangular matrices were only discussed afterward and were not part of the OA.

They later received an hourly work offer without a normal HR onboarding process and decided not to continue.