DP & Matrix

Expect at least one dynamic-programming problem on an Intuit onsite, and keep it in perspective. Intuit's coding is medium-dominant, and its real differentiator is the Craft Demo, the build-and-defend-a-real-service round graded on clean, tested, production Java. No LeetCode problem is Intuit's signature. So dynamic programming is breadth you keep warm rather than a specialty you drill. What earns this family its own page is where the difficulty sits. Intuit's company-tagged problem list runs roughly 16 percent easy and 64 percent medium, with a hard fifth of about 19 percent, and that hard tail lives almost entirely here, in 2D and matrix DP.

That is the honest read, and it should shape how you prepare. The surprise on an Intuit loop is usually a second dimension, rarely a clever one-liner. On the eliminator phone screen, candidates have drawn count-the-robot-paths through an obstacle grid and a Premium question in the same sitting, and a 2026 new-grad report framed its whole onsite around matrix and DP. The genuinely hard band is the same 2D recurrence pushed one notch: the largest square or rectangle of ones in a binary matrix, the longest increasing path in a grid. Get fluent in the 2D table and the hard tail stops being a surprise. This page works three canonical problems: a fewest-coins count in one dimension, robot paths across an obstacle grid, and a Premium question between two strings.

The Intuit angle

Dynamic programming is standard fundamentals at Intuit, so treat it as a recurrence to state cleanly in compiling Java rather than a trick to hunt for. Put the hard tail exactly where it lives, in the 2D and matrix table. The rest of the coding loop borrows its texture from Intuit's own systems. The Craft Demo folds onto a real service you extend and defend live. The design rounds fold onto generic high-level design and, when they go product-domain, onto the tax-rules dependency graph behind TurboTax. Dynamic programming has no matching structure in the product, so when it appears, it appears in textbook form, and the task is the recurrence and nothing else.