Software Engineer Interview Questions

Adam M. - "This is a great question! If you don't mind, I'd love to list 3 strengths and weaknesses then dive a little deeper on one of each of them. I think my three greatest strengths are: Empathy Openness to feedback Drive And three weaknesses I have been working to strengthen are: Sometimes my desire to achieve can put me at risk of overcommitting Communicating status to the right stakeholders at the appropriate time Creating detailed and strategic lists of priorities so I can meet th"See full answer

Namu - "Provided an example from my work history where I asked to move the Go-live date to prevent launch date failure."See full answer

Sohum S. - "I would assume that this is similar to an intervals question. Meeting Rooms II (https://www.lintcode.com/problem/919/?fromId=203&_from=collection) on Leetcode seems like the closest comparison, it's a premium question so I linked Lintcode. I'm assuming that we also need to just return the minimum number of cars used. You need to sort for the most optimal solution, so you're constrained by an O(nlogn) time complexity. So any sorting solution could work (using a heap, sorting the array input arra"See full answer

Shashikant A. - "I followed STAR format"See full answer

Malay K. - "While answering such a question, it is important to focus on personal growth, learning, and how the experience improved your teamwork. You want to demonstrate self-awareness, humility, and an ability to adapt. I had this experience while working on a cross-functional project that involved collaboration between the engineering and marketing teams. In the interview, I shared a story when I misjudged someone and showed unconscious bias towards due their gender, ethnicity or age. It was embarrassin"See full answer

Arshia I. - "General response: Apple’s approach to delivering seamless, personalized experiences through data, while upholding a strong ethical commitment to privacy, resonates with my own values. I want to contribute to projects that optimize user engagement and create meaningful interactions on a large scale, and I believe Apple is the ideal place to make that impact. Tailored to the team: Talk about the product, its impact internally, and the customer."See full answer

דניאל ר. - "Implemented a recursive function which returns the length of the list so far. when the returned value equals k + 1 , assign current.next = current.next.next. If I made it back to the head return root.next as the new head of the linked list."See full answer

Amparo L. - "One time at Lifetime Fitness 2019, One student was throwing a lot of towels in the counter which made things very disorganized, then I made a compromise with my coworker to put 2 towels at a time and then it worked well because it made the workspace very organized."See full answer

Avon T. - "Initialize left pointer: Set a left pointer left to 0. Iterate through the array: Iterate through the array from left to right. If the current element is not 0, swap it with the element at the left pointer and increment left. Time complexity: O(n). The loop iterates through the entire array once, making it linear time. Space complexity: O(1). The algorithm operates in-place, modifying the input array directly without using additional data structures. "See full answer

Srini K. - "performance issues and sudden spikes on input requests by scaling techniques and optimization."See full answer

Alejandro C. - "1 - Oder list of Kid Position and Sellers Positions (ascending) 2 - Implement a method to check distant 'e' for every kid pos (finding nearest seller and checking if sellerpos - currkid_pos < e, for all kid pos) 3 - Calculate mid from 0 to the 'max post' in between both kids and seller list: (max(max(k) -min(k), max(s) - min(s))) 4 - Perform binary search to find distance 'e' that satisfy step '2'"See full answer

Khushbu R. - "General Approach (using Max-Heap) Use a max-heap (priority queue) of size k. For each point: Compute the distance to P. Push it into the heap. If heap size > k, remove the farthest point. The heap will contain the k closest points to P. import java.util.*; public class KClosestPoints { static class Point { int x, y; public Point(int x, int y) { this.x = x; this.y = y; } // Euclidean distance squared (no need to take square root) p"See full answer

Scott S. - " The Situation A few months ago, our trading platform started experiencing significant latency issues during peak trading hours. This latency was affecting our ability to process real-time market data and execute trades efficiently, potentially leading to substantial financial losses and missed opportunities. Identifying the Problem The first step was to identify the root cause of the latency. I organized a team meeting with our data engineers, DevOps, and network specialists to gather"See full answer

Gabriele G. - "DFS with check of an already seen node in the graph would work from collections import deque, defaultdict from typing import List def iscourseloopdfs(idcourse: int, graph: defaultdict[list]) -> bool: stack = deque([(id_course)]) seen_courses = set() while stack: print(stack) curr_course = stack.pop() if currcourse in seencourses: return True seencourses.add(currcourse) for dependency in graph[curr_course]: "See full answer

V V. - "Simple file system ( Hash Map , LSM trees), and consistent hashing. I failed to discuss about conflicts ( Versioning)"See full answer

Kurt K. - "Why skip defining the data model? Or did I just miss it?"See full answer