Software Engineer Interview Questions

Anonymous Mongoose - "The below system design addresses the requirements for a scalable distributed onboarding service, focusing on robust data validation, asynchronous processing, real-time aggregation, and efficient querying of metadata. Core Principles: Asynchronous Processing: Decouple components to ensure high throughput and responsiveness. Scalability & Elasticity: Utilize technologies that can scale horizontally to handle varying loads. Data Durability & Integrity: Ensure no data l"See full answer

Aabid S. - "I work at a startup that makes software for Law Enforcement and the FBI. Our product analyzes calls being made by prison inmates and "listens" for predictors of violence and criminal behavior. Our clients are some of the top state prisons in the country. Recently one of the largest states in the country decided to evaluate our product for their prison system. I demo'd the product to the officers and they seemed to like everything. During the presentation they asked us if the product was ADA com"See full answer

Bipin R. - "As you know, this is the most important question for any interview. Here is a structure I like to follow, Start with 'I'm currently a SDE/PM/TPM etc with XYZ company.... ' Mention how you got into PM/TPM/SDE field (explaining your journey) Mention 1 or 2 accomplishments Mention what you do outside work (blogging, volunteer etc) Share why are you looking for a new role Ask the interviewer if they have any questions or will like to dive deep into any of your experience"See full answer

Vijay M. - "Very well done."See full answer

WaterBuffalo - "One of the most challenging situations was joining a new startup to realize that they did not figure out their core product and that customers were dissatisfied and leaving in droves. I worked together with the leaders to understand the core issue and the reasons that the customers were leaving. Then together with the team, we set out to map out those core issues and the gaps that we had in our product. We then worked towards designing a new solution to address those gaps and build an MVP. W"See full answer

Palak A. - "Designing a system to deny services to requests from banned IPs involves integrating real-time IP checking with your service architecture. Here’s a detailed outline of how you can design such a system: System Design Overview The goal is to ensure that your service can efficiently check incoming requests against a list of banned IPs and deny access when necessary. The system will leverage an external API, security.gov.x, to determine if an IP address is blocked or allowed. **Key Compone"See full answer

Jatin S. - "public int minInsertions(String s) { int n = s.length(); int dp = new intn; for (int len = 2; len <= n; n++) { for (int i = 0; i + len - 1 < n: i++) { int j = i + len - 1; if (s.charAt(i) == s.charAt(j)) { dpi = dpi + 1; } else { dpi = 1 + Math.min(dpi + 1, dpi); } } } return dp0; } `"See full answer

Ayinde B. - "I was working for my friend building streams at venues across the Chicago land area for FGC (fighting game tournaments), I adjusted and engineered his equipment to be set up permanently that's until covid came around at least. I used OBS to give visual appearances to stream watchers. So we're talking about subscribe, follow, and donation notifications and things of that nature for viewers to know they contributed in one of those ways. I set up proper sign-up scheduling for participants to lock t"See full answer

Bella R. - "Approach Clarify the question Define deaf --> unable to hear, but can communicate via sign language, lip read and use all other senses Define fire alarm --> for residential use, it notifies occupants of smoke and potential fires and alerts fire department to check in and/or come over Define constraints --> budgetary constraint, design should be user-friendly and convenient Define goals --> get folks out of harm's way quickly and notify fire department to c"See full answer

Ankush G. - " max Min 4, 3, 1 , 6, 7, 8 1 3 4 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 0 1 1 2 3 6 7 8 9 class MedianFinder{ std::priority_queue minHeap; std::priority_queue, greater> maxHeap; int numEleMaxheap = 0, numEleMinHeap = 0; public: void addNum( int n) { if(numEleMaxheap == numEleMinHeap ) { maxHeap.push(n); int maxofmaxheap = maxHeap.top(); maxHeap.pop(); "See full answer

Anonymous Roadrunner - "def is_palindrome(s: str) -> bool: new = '' for a in s: if a.isalpha() or a.isdigit(): new += a.lower() return (new == new[::-1]) debug your code below print(is_palindrome('abcba')) `"See full answer

Malay K. - "For any project based questions, it is important to structure your response clearly, showcasing your thought process, technical skills, problem-solving abilities, and how your work added value. Besides the STAR method, you can also use this kind of framework: 1. Start by selecting a relevant project (related to the role) Give the project background and what specific problem it solved. 2. Align the project's objective and your role Be specific about your role: were you the le"See full answer

Reno S. - "1. Requirements Analysis Functional Requirements Video streaming with multiple quality levels Content browsing and search Continue watching functionality Content recommendations Non-Functional Requirements Low latency video delivery (<2s startup time) High availability (99.99% uptime) Scalability to handle millions of concurrent streams API response time < 100ms 2. Microservices Architecture Core Microservices Content Service Content metadata mana"See full answer

Ramachandra N. - "def sortedSquares(nums): n = len(nums) result = [0] * n left, right = 0, n - 1 pos = n - 1 while left abs(nums[right]): result[pos] = nums[left] ** 2 left += 1 else: result[pos] = nums[right] ** 2 right -= 1 pos -= 1 return result `"See full answer

Ashish D. - "This is a geometric variation of the "Sliding Window" technique. The core challenge is converting a 2D coordinate problem into a 1D linear problem using angles. The standard approach is the Angular Sweep. By converting the Cartesian coordinates (x,y) of every tree into Polar coordinates (specifically the angle θ), we can process the trees based on the direction they lie in relative to the observer. The Strategy Coordinate Translation: Calculate the relative coordinates (Δx,Δy) for"See full answer

Bamboo Y. - "Since the problem asks for a O(logN) solution, I have to assume that the numbers are already sorted, meaning the same number are adjacent to each other, the value of the numbers shouldn't matter, and they expect us to use Binary Search. First, we should analyze the pattern of a regular number array without a single disrupter. Index: 0 1 2 3 4. 5 6. 7. 8. 9 Array:[1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6] notice the odd indexes are always referencing the second of the reoccurring numbers and t"See full answer

Richard W. - "int getMaxWater(vector& nums) { int n = nums.size(); int mx = INT_MIN; int i=0, j=n-1; while(i<j) { int water = (j - i) * min(nums[i], nums[j]); mx = max(mx, water); if(nums[i] < nums[j]){ i++; } else { j--; } } return mx; } `"See full answer