I applied through an employee referral. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Qualcomm (Santa Clara, CA)
Interview
I applied online and had an in-person recommendation from someone who works at the company. They emailed me to do 2 rounds of technical phone interviews. The interviewers were really nice and helpful. The interviews were about the courses I took in graduate school (I am on my way to PhD by the way), about Probability, Detection/Estimation Theory, Wireless Communications and Signals and Systems. Most were basic things, like definitions of simple things like fading, stability of a filter and so on. I was asked to do some computations on detection in Gaussian channel like error probabilities and detection regions. I was also asked some brain teasers like coin weighing problems. Then I was asked to do an additional third round of interview with similar problems. All the interviewers were nice and helpful.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I more or less knew what the interview would be like, so there was no unexpected question. I guess the problem I had the most difficulty was the brainteaser, a coin weighing problem with faulty coins. You have N coins out of which one is heavier. How many uses of the scale do you need to find it? The second part, now you don't know if it is heavier or lighter. How many uses of the scale do you now need to do? Then you need to relate this to a problem in information and coding theory.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Qualcomm in Nov 2025
Interview
round 1 - OA (campus)
round 2 - interview (which itself consisted of 2 tech rounds and 1 hr round)
Interview process was good, interviewers from company were too good
Technical questions on computer architecture based on core subjects like operating systems, computer networks they grilled specially on practical use cases and how data flow end to end.they asked about concept of pipeline and a bit about knowledge of microcontroller
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Computer architecture
Computer networks
Data structure based on linked list and tree
Qualcomm had come to my University for two roles – Hardware and Software. I applied for Hardware Role. There was one round of online tests and 2 interview rounds.
Round 1 (Online Test): It consisted of 3 sections with 20 questions in each section and 30 mins per section. You can travel through the questions in a particular section. The marking scheme was +1 for the correct answer and -0.25 for the wrong answer. Approximately 1500 people gave the test for both software and hardware role.
