Software Engineer Interview Questions

Shuchi A. - "A few months ago I joined a micro-services platform engineering team as their manager, at that time my team was struggling to deliver towards an upcoming production deadline for a customer facing product. Production date had been moved 5 times already and there were about 40% of product features which were remaining to be tested and signed off to move to production . I was made responsible to deliver the release of this product within the deadline and turnaround the software delivery throughput."See full answer

Jerry O. - "\# Definition for a binary tree node. class TreeNode: def init(self, val=0, left=None, right=None): self.val = val self.left = left self.right = right class Solution: def maxPathSum(self, root: TreeNode) -> int: self.max_sum = float('-inf')"See full answer

fuzzyicecream14 - "Situation: As a Product Manager at Cisco, I was leading the development of a new highly critical product for enterprise customers. Midway through the project, a key engineering team was reassigned due to an urgent security patch, leaving us understaffed with only six weeks left before a critical customer pilot. Task: I had to ensure the product launched on time without sacrificing key features, despite losing half of our engineering team. The challenge was to"See full answer

Stanislav I. - "I want to work at Stripe because Stripe has become the industry standard for many businesses and startups in the world. As a CFO I would be proud to work with a leader on a processing market, improving it position with my skills and experience. I will be happy to be a part of this great Team and learn from them."See full answer

Luca D. - "The real discussion was very much similar o what exposed at https://www.tryexponent.com/courses/software-engineering/system-design/design-rate-limiter, but - as I commented the video - the real interviewer wasn't so naive to do not forgive the client identification only because IP. I had to introduce glimpses of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowyourcustomer practice, I quoted JWT. I proposed a logical map of id addressing a "deque" of time-stamps of requests, with a threshold for the deque an"See full answer

Yag S. - "I studied Exponent's TinyURL system design video. My interviewer was asking many detailed questions on API design, schema, as well as data required to store. I found system design questions are bit high level instead of depth. I think should have detail design of API, schema and some additional flavors."See full answer

Anonymous Capybara - "using a relational database isn't a good choice for this system! we need more availability here than consistency (CAP theorem)"See full answer

Anonymous Jellyfish - "Microservices for resolving diffs, storage S3 for keeping files"See full answer

Anonymous Unicorn - "Count items between indices within compartments compartments are delineated by by: '|' items are identified by: '*' input_inventory = "*||||" inputstartidxs = [1, 4, 6] inputendidxs = [9, 5, 8] expected_output = [3, 0, 1] Explanation: "*||||" 0123456789... indices ++ + # within compartments ^ start_idx = 1 ^ end_idx = 9 -- - # within idxs but not within compartments "*||||" 0123456789... indices "See full answer

An D. - "Understanding the Basics Choosing Learning Resources Practicing and Applying Knowledge Seeking Help and Staying Updated Leveraging Modern Tools"See full answer

Bini T. - "I understand this is more focused on ML. However, I have a system question. If users allow us to access their location, or they send location via text box, could we use CDNs for the search without hitting our database? We only query the database when we have zero information on location. Other questions: does embedding always guarantee information on location? Do we discharge the user images after we return a prediction? I heard the feedback that we should keep it for future learning. What would"See full answer

Ven E. - "I saw this question in one of my interviews."See full answer

Bulent K. - "I said we could always revert the production issues. Solve it at DEV environment and then publish again. Interviewer gave me an example of it like a database schema change that may not be possible to revert. I said that we always used SQL scripts to upgrade and downgrade the database schema for each production deployment. So it would not be a problem for us. I guess my answer was not accepted."See full answer

Anonymous Roadrunner - "from typing import List def three_sum(nums: List[int]) -> List[List[int]]: nums.sort() triplets = set() for i in range(len(nums) - 2): firstNum = nums[i] l = i + 1 r = len(nums) - 1 while l 0: r -= 1 elif potentialSum < 0: l += 1 "See full answer

Rick E. - " from typing import List def getnumberof_islands(binaryMatrix: List[List[int]]) -> int: if not binaryMatrix: return 0 rows = len(binaryMatrix) cols = len(binaryMatrix[0]) islands = 0 for r in range(rows): for c in range(cols): if binaryMatrixr == 1: islands += 1 dfs(binaryMatrix, r, c) return islands def dfs(grid, r, c): if ( r = len(grid) "See full answer

Anonymous Raccoon - "def find_primes(n): lst=[] for i in range(2,n+1): is_prime=1 for j in range(2,int(i**0.5)+1): if i%j==0: is_prime=0 break if is_prime: lst.append(i) return lst "See full answer