I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Qualcomm (San Diego, CA) in Nov 2010
Interview
The hiring process takes a very long time which can be a bit frustrating.. The interview process was challenging but a lot of fun. About a month after submitting my resume I got an email to schedule a phone interview. The phone interview was just to see if I was worth bringing in for onsite interviews (which are very intense). I had my onsite interviews the following week and talked to 6 different people, each interview took about an hour. All the interviewers were very nice and pleasant and very knowledgable. I was most impressed. 5 of the interviews were technical (well the lunch interview was just shooting the breeze about software with the interviewer) and the last one was with the HR recruiter. Lots of technial questions (as expected) but also questions about dealing with people and what I'm looking for in a job. They really want to see if you're a fit for the Qualcomm team above and beyond your technical skills. There were questions about C/C++, differences between C++ and Java, object oriented design questions, and some system design questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a C function to return the number of set bits in an integer.
It was a 5-step interview. Four of them were technical and the last one was with HR. The first two interviews were conducted with the Ireland team. The interviewers were great guys. They checked my basic C language and software design knowledge in those interviews. The last two interviews were conducted with US-based engineering managers. They asked both behavioral and technical questions, as well as a coding question in the last part of the interview. I suggest doing some practice on LeetCode before taking the interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a task scheduler on the bare metal environment.
It is first round with HM. HM digging deep on my resume bullets. HM mainly asked behavioral questions for each bullets. Overall experience is great. We had great conversations. one pseudo coding on parallel programming.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Noida) in Dec 2025
Interview
They gave no idea about overall process. Just calling to scheduling rounds. No alignment discussions. Just kept on taking technical rounds without sharing any details of role. And post all rounds gave an offer way below my current compensation. Overall wasted my time & I would recommended anyone in my network to go with them.
4 technical rounds were there. Mostly general - DSA, sorting & searching algos, some hard leetcode, system design & resume deep dive.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Sorting & searching algos, Hard leetcode, resume deep dive
