Software Engineer Interview Experiences & Questions
467 real Software Engineer interviews from 165 companies: what each round covers, the exact questions, and who got the offer.
What to expect · Software Engineer
Based on 467 real interviews
Software Engineer interviews by company
The Software Engineer interview process
Most common round types: Coding (224), Behavioral (177), System Design (130), Technical (121), Data Structures & Algorithms (66), Project Discussion (51).
Real Software Engineer interview questions
- Describe an experience working in a cross-functional team.
- Find Leaves Of Binary Tree
- Tell me about yourself.
- How would you design a frequency capping system?
- 1. Question: Given an array of integers, find the length of the longest contiguous subarray that contains at most two distinct numbers.
- Given an org chart tree, compute each employee's level, identify balanced employees, and build a histogram of employees by level.
- Walk me through the take-home you submitted and explain your design decisions.
- 1 ML sys design - how would you go about doing NLP and bag of words and create a system of words to predict the next word etc..
- What data models do you need for an advertiser to start a campaign and show ads to users?
- Here is a large Python file with three bugs. Find where the bugs are coming from and fix them.
- Present a project of your choice.
- I was given a snippet of code and was asked how to find mistakes and what can i do it to make it production ready
- Experience, Professional history
- Standard Behavioural Questions - Why do you want to join etc.
- Tell me about the most challenging situation you faced in your career and how you handled it.
- Design a file system where we can add a directory and erase a directory and find the number of directories under one directory.
- Question: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/2064646/google-screening-interview-question-may-2022
- Can you walk me through your background and the projects you've worked on?
- How would you use AI to improve the testing coverage and reliability of a service?
- You are given a string containing lowercase English letters. Find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
- Solve this timed HackerRank problem and then handle the harder second part.
- Solve this Python palindrome-style coding question.
- One LC round about Djikstra
- Merge Intervals
- How would you improve LinkedIn Messaging?
- Tell me about a time you made a mistake.
- Design a highly distributed trading system.
- Design a doubly linked list.
- What do you know about algorithms?
- Tell me about a project.
- One Behavioral round - asking my projects, work, hobby projects, conflicts, what is the proudest work I have done.
- Given nums + window size k, return the max for each sliding window in O(n) time complexity.
- Top K Frequent Elements
- Can you walk me through your experience?
- Design a brokerage system.
- Given three C++ function headers, implement the underlying cache or buffer behavior they describe.
- If the data set is too large to fit in memory on one machine and you have multiple workers, how would you sort it?
- Tell me about a project that failed.
- Last about another LC - this had a graph question - dont remember exactly but this was again very close to double bfs or something.
- Implement a webcrawler with BFS-like traversal.
Showing 40 of 1304 questions. Open any experience for every question and how the candidate answered.
Latest Software Engineer interview experiences
“Typical Google screening round, I fumbled during the implementation using c++, hence got rejected. Make sure to write working code and go through test cases.”
“Overall, the experience was constructive, and I appreciated the opportunity to engage with the interviewers and better understand the expectations of the role.”
“The process was very rigorous. Especially the project deep dive. The final round was actually not too bad but I just didn't perform well because I missed some details. It was refreshing to not be…”
“Just like any other normal SWE process. Online interviews were postponed a lot, took over 2 months to complete the interview process.”
“Interviewer expects you to speak chinese and started off the interview doing so — had to ask for English. Messed up a little on my first pass of implementation, but fixed it quickly, finished 15…”
“Technical round was comparatively easy than the final round. Take home project is also an easy one, kind of standard.”
“In DSA it was focusing on Design DSA style problem, then i have HLD and LLD interviews. Design DSA: Implement Trie for recent searches usecase LLD: Bookmyshow style ticket booking system HLD: Design…”
“The process moves pretty fast. There are many interview experiences made public, so do your research. Overall experience was good. Many engineers with great backgrounds.”
“The questions were not too difficult, more so worry about asking clarifying questions and making sure your implementation is clear to the interviewer.”
“The interviews at Pure storage focusses a lot on concurrency and understanding and recognizing the core problems. not standard leetcode problems.”
“Online assessment was not difficult but super lengthy. The question was closer to the actual problems stripe works on.”
“It was an neutral interview, average difficuitly. The interviewer is nice and supportive, couldn't answer one of question but they say it's ok.”
“The process was a fairly standard call with a recruiter. I think having a gap on my resume really hurt me here, because I received a rejection and can't explain the rejection any other way.”
“I have completed the Online Assessment as of now and I am waiting for my results. The most important thing is to practice reading comprehension and extracting the necessary rules/constraints and…”
“HR intro call, then a few technical rounds covering LeetCode-style coding and a deep dive on past projects. The interviewers were knowledgeable and friendly. It felt a bit rushed, with tight…”
“I was allowed to use AI for the first screening technical interview. Still interviewing with the rest of the team, but the rest of the interviews (System Design, 2 coding interviews, Project retro,…”
“The process was lengthy but the recruiter was in constant touch and providing information on what to do and how to prepare. The interviewers were good and polite”
“It was in cpp. Needs to know well the syntax of cpp. Also be prepared to be asked some fundamental questions regarding synchronization, lock, threading, etc.”
“In DSA round I was able to solve both questions, but did not do very well in follow ups. The interviewer's network connection was week so I couldn't completely understand what he was saying. Review…”
“The process was fairly straightforward, and most interviewers were easy to talk to. I felt good about the coding portion, especially when I took a minute to clarify the requirements before jumping…”
“Graphs preparation. Although I wasn't able to come to the solution but I identified the problem. I attempted it and also cleared the round but they gave offer to someone else ahead in the interview…”
“The overall interview process was really good. Both interviewers were experienced and made the rounds feel more like technical discussions than just solving a problem. In the first round, we…”
“The OA was fairly difficult. There were 4 total questions. You can choose the language to code in. All of which will be DSA problems. I got a perfect score on each question and still got rejected…”
“Interview process was smooth and straight forward. Interviewer was helpful in navigating the problem and determining criteria.”
“I was weak on the API part so all else went well except that. Be good at RAG and AI agentic and AI systems. Also be good in web development (APIs, AWS deployment)”
“The recruiter reached out with an online assessment shortly after I applied. I was given one week to complete it. The assessment was a 3-tiered coding exercise on Hackerrank, where I had to design…”
“The recruiter was very helpful throughout the entire process. They really want to see you succeed in the interview and provide helpful advice.”
“A total of 5 rounds, starting with phone screen where a dsa problem was given and candidate expected to write the code from scratch and run it, this was elimination round. Followed by bug bash, lld,…”
“They wouldn't tell me what type of interview it would be, so I went in completely blind. I ended up getting a JavaScript coding question even though the role required familiarity with multiple…”
“The process was very fair and there was a clear emphasis on communication and culture fit. Everyone I interviewed with was very pleasant and encouraging. My one complaint would be the sense that the…”
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are in the Software Engineer interview?
Candidates report a typical 3 rounds, usually including a recruiter screen, online assessment, phone screen, take-home assignment.
How hard is the Software Engineer interview?
Candidates rate it 3.1/5 on average (medium), across 467 interviews.
How long does the Software Engineer hiring process take?
About 3 weeks from first contact to decision, based on reported timelines.
What percentage of Software Engineer candidates get an offer?
44% of candidates with a final result got an offer (160 of 361).
What does the Software Engineer interview focus on?
The most common round types are Coding, Behavioral, System Design, Technical.