Dropbox SWE Intern (Summer 2026) Interview Experience | CodeSignal OA | Status: PENDING

Title: Dropbox | SWE Intern (Summer 2026) | Canada | OA Experience

Tags: Dropbox, Internship, Canada, Online Assessment, CodeSignal

Post Content:

I just finished the Online Assessment for the Dropbox Summer 2026 internship. I didn't see much info on the current pool of questions so I thought I'd drop a quick summary of what I got.

The test was on CodeSignal. It was 4 questions total with a 70 minute time limit.

1. Algorithm (Standard LeetCode)
The coding question was literally Candy (LeetCode 135)(Hard).

• You have n children standing in a line and each has a rating.
• You need to distribute candies so that every child gets at least one, and children with a higher rating than their neighbors get more candies.
• Goal is to find the minimum candies needed.

I solved this using the standard two-pass greedy approach (left-to-right then right-to-left). If you've done the problem before, it's pretty straightforward.

2. Database (2 SQL Questions)
These were decent but you have to be careful with the date filtering.

• Question 1: Find new user signups by country.
  I was given a db_user table and had to write a query to count how many new users came from each country for each month in Q1 2021. Just a standard GROUP BY and date range filter.
• Question 2: Calculate Retention Rate.
  This asked for the percentage of users who joined in Jan 2021 (from db_user) that were also active in Feb 2021 (based on db_engagement). I used a LEFT JOIN to map the users and calculated the ratio.

3. DevOps / Data Manipulation (Pandas)
The last question wasn't a standard coding problem but a data analysis task using Python's Pandas library.

• Goal: Read a CSV file of customer data and find the country with the largest number of contracts.
• The Catch: You had to handle tie-breaking carefully. If two countries had the same count, the one that came later alphabetically (e.g., Z before A) had to be chosen.
• Approach: I used groupby to sum the contracts, then sort_values with a specific order to handle the tie-breaker, and printed the result in the exact requested format.

Overall Thoughts
The time limit is a bit tight if you get stuck on the SQL syntax or maybe DevOps part, but otherwise, it's very doable. Make sure you brush up on your JOINs and basic greedy algorithms. It was kind of okay-ish, didn't expect a hard question in intern position's online assessment tbh.

Good luck to everyone applying!