Skip to main content

Welcome to Exponent's Software Engineering Interview Prep Course!

Software engineering interviews can feel like they're designed to make you anxious. You might be confused about the best approach to take when preparing for your interview, and you’re not alone.

After coaching hundreds of clients, Exponent strongly believes that at the end of the day, nothing works better than practice. That's why your Exponent membership includes:

  • Practice questions for all types of SWE interview questions including data structures and algorithms, coding interview practice, system design, and behavioral questions.
  • A dynamic, interactive platform for self-guided coding prep - including a code editor.
  • Refresher lessons on the most common data structures and algorithms.
  • Mock interview videos with software engineers and engineering managers at top tech companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more.
  • Access to our Slack community for support.
  • A peer to peer mock interview platform offering live practice twice daily.

What You'll Learn

Exponent's SWE track will teach you to master the most common SWE interview rounds including system design, data structures, algorithms, and behavioral questions. You'll review critical SWE concepts, apply proven frameworks to technical rounds, and practice answering real-world questions.

Specifically, you will:

  • Discuss the necessary tradeoffs between reliability, scalability, and maintainability in real-world systems.
  • Describe the characteristics of the "best" systems and outline such a system in an interview scenario.
  • Practice working with common data structures and algorithms as you answer recently asked coding problems.
  • Develop a strong SWE story bank to help you ace behavioral interviews.

How to Use This Course

The SWE interview contains a few basic categories:

  • Coding: These questions assess your ability to solve problems with code. The best practice for these is a thorough review of common data structures and algorithms, and practice.
  • System Design: “Design Reddit” for example. These questions assess more than just your technical knowledge - your communication skills, critical thinking, and even your business acumen are being tested. Don’t worry - we’ve got plenty of resources to help.
  • Behavioral: Either experiential (”tell me about a time when you...”) or hypothetical (”what would you do if...”), behavioral questions assess how you’ll react to common work scenarios - how you work with others, how you manage your time, how you recover from mistakes, etc.

Coding Interview Prep

To start prepping for coding interviews, read through the data structures and algorithms lessons for a quick refresher. Then, try your hand at one of the relevant practice problems linked at the bottom to test your skills. If you’re rusty on graph search, for example, you might want to go through a few.

After that, we find it helpful to watch a few mocks so that you get a feel for how these questions are answered in real-time. Once you feel comfortable with the cadence, try a few more practice questions until you feel confident. Not sure where to start with coding interviews? Check out this article on Byte-by-Byte for some additional tips.

System Design Prep

We recommend prepping for system design in small chunks - it’s a lot to digest. Once you’ve read through the intro lessons on frameworks and the system design rubric, watch a few mock videos. Get a feel for the interview, then browse through the fundamentals course to refresh your technical basics, and design a few systems on your own. When you feel comfortable, sign up for a system design mock interview (or three!)

It’s important to get a sense of how systems work in real companies, so be sure to check out the case studies linked at the bottom of each fundamentals lesson, and read through the engineering blogs of any companies you’re interested in.

When designing systems, remember that there’s no single correct answer - but by working through your design and explaining your choices, you’ll be able to improve the structure and content of your response. This is a trainable skill, so don't give up!

Behavioral Interview Prep

Finally, make sure you leave time for behavioral interviews. The best way to do so is to build a story bank, and practice using it in a realistic setting. We recommend signing up for as many behavioral mock interviews as you can, until you feel confident.

If you have questions or thoughts, visit the Exponent PM Slack Channel and actively participate. There, you can learn even more about the right approaches to each question.

If you reach the end of the course and you want more behavioral prep, head on over to our interview question database. Practice these seriously. We select the top answers to give detailed feedback and analysis.

More Information

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to others in our Slack Channel community!

Next Lesson