Software Engineering Fundamentals interview questions

Showing 571–600 of 1208 results

• Shopping Cart Totals with Best-Offer Discounts and Aisle Ordering, Frozen Items LastMedium

  A practical coding exercise that parses shopping-cart item records and reports the total item count and price, then adds percentage discounts and buy-N-get-M-free offers, applying the cheapest offer per product. A final part orders items by aisle with frozen items last, testing parsing, exact money arithmetic and extensible code.

  InstacartSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Simulate bus boarding with priority and wheelchairsMedium

  This question evaluates queue and priority handling, stable ordering, capacity accounting, constraint handling for wheelchair riders, and the ability to design unit tests and articulate trade-offs within the Software Engineering Fundamentals category.

  InstacartSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Specify the Lowest Price Across Percentage and Buy-X-Get-Y DiscountsMedium

  Clarify percentage and buy-x-get-y pricing rules, then reason about the cheapest legal discount combination, quantity thresholds, interactions, and rounding.

  InstacartSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Explain Vector, Linked List, and PolymorphismMedium

  This question evaluates competency in C++ data structures and object-oriented polymorphism, testing understanding of dynamic array versus linked-list memory layouts, random access and insertion/deletion performance, cache locality, iterator invalidation, typical use cases, and distinctions between compile-time and runtime polymorphism including overloading, templates, inheritance, and virtual functions. It is commonly asked in software engineering fundamentals interviews to assess reasoning about performance and design trade-offs in C++ systems code; the domain is C++ programming, data structures, and OOP, and the level of abstraction spans both conceptual understanding and practical application.

  Intercontinental ExchangeSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Parse nested XML inside CDATAMedium

  This problem tests your ability to safely extract, parse, and validate nested XML structures embedded within CDATA sections while addressing common parsing pitfalls.

  IntersystemsSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Aggregate transactions by status and failure reasons (SQL)Medium

  This question evaluates a candidate's proficiency with SQL aggregation, grouping, window functions, string aggregation, and normalization techniques for summarizing transactional records by status and failure reasons.

  IntuitSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnline Assessment
• Design a VIP-Aware Rate LimiterMedium

  Design a windowed rate limiter that admits five requests per window, prioritizing VIP requests while guaranteeing non-preemption, idempotency, and starvation prevention for regular users.

  IntuitStaff Software EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Find largest file in a directory using BashMedium

  This problem tests your ability to navigate the file system using command-line utilities and process streaming data to identify files based on size metadata.

  IntuitSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnline Assessment
• Implement Role-Aware User Information ViewsMedium

  Implement a field-level access control engine that redacts sensitive attributes from user profile records based on viewer permissions, context, and ownership relationships.

  IntuitStaff Software EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Architecture and Data-Scaling Trade-offsMedium

  This question assesses the ability to articulate trade-offs between architectural styles (monolith vs. microservices) and data storage strategies (sharding vs. replication) in the context of a high-throughput financial system.

  J.P. MorganSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Compute expected value of simple gambling gamesEasy

  This problem tests your understanding of expected value, probability distributions, and the mechanics of independent trials in simple gambling games.

  J.P. MorganData ScientistSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Exception Handling in a RESTful Service with @ControllerAdviceMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a centralized exception handling mechanism in a Java Spring environment, ensuring consistent API error responses and proper abstraction of internal implementation details.

  J.P. MorganSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Explain C++ virtual dispatch and object lifetimeMedium

  This question tests the candidate's understanding of C++ memory management, the mechanics of the virtual method table (vtable), and the importance of virtual destructors in polymorphic inheritance.

  J.P. MorganData ScientistSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Explain Polymorphism and Binary Trees, and How You Use AI Tools as an EngineerMedium

  A software engineering fundamentals discussion with no coding problem: explain polymorphism with examples, describe binary trees and binary search trees with their traversals and costs, and explain how you use AI tools responsibly. It tests precise definitions, complexity reasoning and engineering judgment.

  J.P. MorganSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Explain Python Concurrency, HTTP Update Semantics, Garbage Collection, and DeadlocksMedium

  Assess core backend engineering fundamentals including Python concurrency tradeoffs, RESTful update semantics, runtime garbage collection mechanisms, and deadlock prevention strategies.

  J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer IISoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Explain Stack Use Cases and Mutability in Python ContainersMedium

  This problem tests the understanding of LIFO data structure applications, the implications of object mutability in Python, and the technical constraints imposed by hashability in container types.

  J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer IISoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Java Core Deep Dive: Concurrent Collections and Java 8 FeaturesMedium

  This question tests your understanding of thread-safety in Java collections and your ability to refactor imperative code into functional Java 8 style streams.

  J.P. MorganSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Reason About Concurrency, CAP Trade-Offs, and Kubernetes ScalingMedium

  This problem tests your understanding of fundamental concurrency concepts, distributed systems trade-offs under partition, and the practical application of Kubernetes scaling mechanisms in a high-throughput environment.

  J.P. MorganSoftware Engineer IISoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Reason About Top K Frequent Values at ScaleMedium

  Tests understanding of single-machine bounded-heap top-k frequency counting and how to scale the design to distributed, partitioned data pipelines.

  J.P. MorganSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Review a PR for thread-safe request handlingMedium

  This problem tests your ability to identify race conditions and thread-safety issues in a concurrent service and suggests robust design patterns for handling shared resources.

  J.P. MorganSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Review concurrent code qualityMedium

  This question tests your ability to identify thread-safety issues, improper synchronization, and architectural code smells within a multi-threaded data processing class.

  J.P. MorganSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Build a Self-Service Market Data Discovery and Support LayerMedium

  This problem tests your ability to design a robust metadata-driven orchestration layer that manages data lineage, access control, and quality monitoring for financial market datasets.

  Jain GlobalData EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Alternating Die-Roll Game: Optimal Accept/Reject StrategyHard

  This question evaluates probabilistic reasoning, dynamic decision-making and zero-sum game analysis, testing competency in expected-value calculations, optimal stopping and symmetric strategic reasoning.

  Jane StreetQuantitative TraderSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Build a Web Calculator That Matches a Reference AppMedium

  This question evaluates frontend engineering competencies—interactive UI implementation, state management, event-driven logic, and visual layout fidelity—within the domain of software engineering fundamentals and web frontend development.

  Jane StreetFrontend EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Design Exchange and Instrument Abstractions for Quote ArbitrageMedium

  Design an in-memory cross-exchange quote aggregator and arbitrage detector that identifies profitable, actionable price discrepancies while handling invalid spreads, quote staleness, and order sizing.

  Jane StreetSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Five Pumpkins Weighed in Every Pair: Find the Total WeightMedium

  This question evaluates combinatorial counting, algebraic reasoning, and mental-arithmetic skills by testing understanding of pairwise sums and how individual elements contribute to aggregate totals.

  Jane StreetQuantitative ResearcherSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Turning Interview Code into a Reusable Library or APIMedium

  This question evaluates a candidate's skills in software design and engineering practices, including modularization, API and library interface design, documentation and typing, robustness and error handling, testing, packaging, versioning, and state/transport considerations.

  Jane StreetSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Which Dice Game Wins More Often: One Six in 4 Rolls, or Double Sixes in 24 Rolls?Medium

  This question evaluates probabilistic reasoning and statistical intuition, focusing on independence of trials, event probability versus expected value, and the ability to compare probabilities of rare events.

  Jane StreetQuantitative ResearcherSoftware Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
• Write an Interpreter for a Small Language with Load, Store and ArithmeticMedium

  Practice writing an interpreter for a small language with load, store and integer arithmetic instructions, using an assumed stack-based specification. It tests parsing source text into instructions, executing them with correct operand order, and reporting errors such as stack underflow, undefined variables and division by zero.

  Jane StreetSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
• Design Stack Evaluators and Low-Latency Memory PrimitivesEasy

  This question tests your understanding of low-latency systems programming, focusing on thread-safe memory management, cache locality, and efficient expression parsing.

  Jump TradingSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen