Software Engineer Interview Questions

Tim W. - "Clarify "What do you mean by favorite product? Are you thinking specifically hardware, software, or a feature within those, or something non-electronic? Dealer's Choice. "Are you asking why I love this product, or to explain why this product is a market leader independent of how i feel about it? Talk about why YOU love this product. Rephrase Question With all that in mind, i want to rephrase the question. "What is your favorite software product and what features in this product"See full answer

Alok S. - "I’d clarify the scope first. I’ll assume they want: Given a root folder and a search text, recursively find all files whose filename contains that text. Code: #include #include #include #include using namespace std; namespace fs = std::filesystem; vector searchFiles(const string& rootPath, const string& target) { vector ans; if(!fs::exists(rootPath)) { return ans; } // recursively go through all folder"See full answer

Joshua K. - "Constrain is the inbound link, so the solution is to download the file once and then distribute it internally, rather than having every machine hit that link independently. So this may call for a central staging node and p2p distribution (bit torrent style)"See full answer

Anonymous Aardvark - "Recently, I had to make a decision that I could automate a part of a process now and help the operations team reducing 9 hours of manual work to 60 minutes for one client. The second option was to fully automate the end to end process that would take 4 weeks of development, but fully automate the process and that could be rolled out across the board. The process was to change the member's paperless preference to paper when a sent email gets bounced 3 times in a row and inform her with a paper"See full answer

NKM - "In my previous role as a Technical Integration Lead, the business wanted a notification feature to alert clients about new clients or documents. They wanted real-time in-portal notifications and daily email summaries at 7am. I built a Kafka listener to catch events, saving them in the DB with a "new" status. For logged-in clients, I used WebSocket to push notifications to their portal. The system checks for new docs/clients on page load and displays them. For emails, I set up a Stone branch sche"See full answer

Nicola R. - "You shouldn't hire me if you're looking for someone to simply write code in large volumes without considering the bigger picture. I'm someone who thrives on solving root problems, building, cohesive systems, and ensuring stakeholder alignment. If the priority is speed over thoughtful analysis, I might not be the best fit. However, if you're looking for someone who can drive meaningful and scalable solutions, collaborate effectively, and contribute to long-term success, then I believe I'd bring s"See full answer

Sreenisha S. - "Let me tell you about a time where a website I managed suddenly showed slow performance and the mistake on our side was it was unnoticed until a user reported the issue to management. As a PM for that project, I took full responsibility of the situation and worked with the engineering team to quickly resolve it. This mistake taught me the importance of focusing and monitoring non functional requirements as well in addition to new feature development /adoption where I was mostly spending my time"See full answer

Alok S. - "Functional requirements: user can send an input and wait for the result Group up to 100 individual requests in to single GPU The system should should send results back to the user who requested it when done Non functional requirements: Minimize the waiting between two batches of execution/ reduce idle time error message if a batch faiils Scale to support multiple GPUs Core Entities: Request Batch Result API Design: POST /predict -> {requestid: "", response: ""} req"See full answer

Bjorn L. - "Whatever your situation is, the correct answer is: "I'm very happy with my current job (expand on your experience, ability to deliver, team, achievements etc). But when I saw this opportunity, I had find out more." You essentially want to sounds interested, but clarify that your current situation is great."See full answer

Dev S. - "#include #include bool palindrome(std::string &str, int left, int right, int error) { if (left >= right) { return true; } if (str[left] == str[right]) { return palindrome(str, left + 1, right - 1, error); } else if (error == 0) { return (palindrome(str, left + 1, right, 1) || palindrome(str,left, right -1,1)); } else { return false; } } int main() { std::string str = "abcbca"; int size = str.size() - 1; if"See full answer

叶 路. - "from collections import deque def updateword(words, startword, end_word): if end_word not in words: return None # Early exit if end_word is not in the dictionary queue = deque([(start_word, 0)]) # (word, steps) visited = set([start_word]) # Keep track of visited words while queue: word, steps = queue.popleft() if word == end_word: return steps # Found the target word, return steps for i in range(len(word)): "See full answer

Ross B. - "I most want to communicate a few principals of conflict resolution that I believe were integral in this situation, which are mutual respect, a results orientation, an unwavering focus on the user. To that end, here’s how I’d like to structure this answer: First, I’ll tell you about the project we were working on, to provide some background for you. Second, I’ll describe the disagreement. Third, I’ll describe how we arrived at a solution, and finally, I’ll discuss how those 3 conflict resolut"See full answer

Divya G. - "Designing a web-based word processor like Google Docs requires a robust system capable of handling real-time collaboration, high availability, and massive data consistency. 1. High-Level Architecture The system follows a microservices architecture to manage different concerns independently: Client Side: A web or mobile application that handles the UI and local state. Load Balancer: Distributes incoming traffic across multiple web servers to ensure high availability. **Web Serve"See full answer

Theodore (teddy) W. - "So here is what I would do if I had to designing a system to log messages in order involves several considerations, including the choice of software, hardware, storage mechanisms, and scalability. Here’s how I would approach this: 1. Requirements Analysis: Message Format: Define the structure of the messages to log (e.g., text, JSON). Volume: Estimate the expected volume of messages per second. This will help in determining the infrastructure requirements. **Order Guarantee"See full answer

Aabid S. - "We had a huge launch on September 1st of this year where we completely redesigned our application from the grounds up and also migrated to a new platform (React.JS). This project took us 8 months and the launch was a huge deal for the team. Unfortunately the launch wasn't as smooth as we expected and despite doing multiple rounds of QA, some major issues cropped up in the core part of the app right after launch and our client was quite upset since it was disrupting their day-to-day workflow. "See full answer

Tracy M. - "ingestion, processing & storage layer to handle document processing client ->API gateway/entry point->object storage-> queue-> worker-> database data flow: client initiates document upload + status processing API gateway (upload endpoint: authenticates & authorizes request, creates pre-assigned url to upload document); status endpoint object storage - stores uploaded document unstructured data (images, pdfs, docx etc) via preassigned url Message queue to decouple ingestion from proc"See full answer

Ravi K. - "select e.firstname as firstname, m.salary as manager_salary from employees e join employees m on e.manager_id = m.id where e.salary > m.salary; `"See full answer

Ushita S. - "A clarifying question: Is this question asking about when I met a tight deadline in a project or how did I manage a project that had a tight deadline? The answer uploaded to this question is good, I would also add 'creating a critical path from overall project schedule and then making sure that none of the deliverables in the critical path are sacrificed in order to meet the tight deadline' as an action taken."See full answer