practice a little every day, paws crossed ♡
Software Engineering Fundamentals Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
- 9403
- Questions
- 546
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 271–300 of 625 results
- InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerShopping Cart Totals with Best-Offer Discounts and Aisle Ordering, Frozen Items Last
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerSimulate bus boarding with priority and wheelchairs
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - Intercontinental ExchangeMediumSoftware EngineerExplain Vector, Linked List, and Polymorphism
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - IntersystemsMediumSoftware EngineerParse nested XML inside CDATA
This problem tests your ability to safely extract, parse, and validate nested XML structures embedded within CDATA sections while addressing common parsing pitfalls.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenXMLParsingSecurity - IntuitMediumStaff Software EngineerDesign a VIP-Aware Rate Limiter
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenRate LimiterSystem DesignQueues - IntuitMediumStaff Software EngineerImplement Role-Aware User Information Views
Implement a field-level access control engine that redacts sensitive attributes from user profile records based on viewer permissions, context, and ownership relationships.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenAccess ControlSecuritySoftware Design - J.P. MorganEasyData ScientistCompute expected value of simple gambling games
This problem tests your understanding of expected value, probability distributions, and the mechanics of independent trials in simple gambling games.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenProbabilityStatisticsExpected Value - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerExplain Polymorphism and Binary Trees, and How You Use AI Tools as an Engineer
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerReason About Top K Frequent Values at Scale
Tests understanding of single-machine bounded-heap top-k frequency counting and how to scale the design to distributed, partitioned data pipelines.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenHeapHash MapDistributed Systems - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerReview a PR for thread-safe request handling
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenConcurrencyThread-SafetyDesign Patterns - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerReview concurrent code quality
This question tests your ability to identify thread-safety issues, improper synchronization, and architectural code smells within a multi-threaded data processing class.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenConcurrencyJavaThread-Safety - Jain GlobalMediumData EngineerBuild a Self-Service Market Data Discovery and Support Layer
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenSystem DesignData EngineeringMetadata - Jane StreetHardQuantitative TraderAlternating Die-Roll Game: Optimal Accept/Reject Strategy
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - Jane StreetMediumFrontend EngineerBuild a Web Calculator That Matches a Reference App
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - Jane StreetMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Exchange and Instrument Abstractions for Quote Arbitrage
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenLow-Level DesignTrading SystemsData Structures - Jane StreetMediumSoftware EngineerTurning Interview Code into a Reusable Library or API
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - Jane StreetMediumSoftware EngineerWrite an Interpreter for a Small Language with Load, Store and Arithmetic
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.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - Jump TradingEasySoftware EngineerDesign Stack Evaluators and Low-Latency Memory Primitives
This question tests your understanding of low-latency systems programming, focusing on thread-safe memory management, cache locality, and efficient expression parsing.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenC++ConcurrencyLow-Latency - Jump TradingHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Compact Columnar File Format
Design an append-friendly, compact columnar file format optimized for fast analytical scans over tabular financial market data (e.g., tick feeds or order book snapshots). Define the on-disk binary layout, reader/writer abstractions, serialization rules, and operational trade-offs.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screensystems-designfile-formatscolumnar-storage - KikoffEasySoftware EngineerBuild a Robust Log Parser and Prefix-Operator Search
Implement a log parser and query engine that converts raw server log lines into structured records and supports filtering via prefix-operator tokens.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenString ParsingData StructuresSoftware Architecture - KikoffEasySoftware EngineerValidate a Third-Party Identity Payload
Implement a pipeline that validates a third-party identity verification response against schema requirements and business rules while returning sanitized failure reason codes.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenData ValidationPythonClean Code - LayerzeroMediumSoftware EngineerChoose a Safe Polling Strategy for Delayed Records
Evaluate whether delayed arrivals can support a fixed polling interval that always yields exactly one new record. Use worst-case reasoning, then define a practical live contract covering observation limits, warm-up, buffering, cursors, deduplication, retries, out-of-order data, and multiple pollers.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Raffle Drum That Draws Duplicate Tickets Fairly in O(1)
Design a drum that holds raffle ticket codes, where the same code can be dropped in more than once, and supports adding a ticket, pulling a specific ticket out, and drawing one at random so every physical ticket in the drum is equally likely to come out — all in average O(1) time. Tests combining an array with a hash index so removal and random draw both stay constant time even with string keys and duplicates.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screendesignhash-maprandomization - LinkedInHardSoftware EngineerMerge and Serialize N-ary Trees
Tests recursive tree manipulation, immutable merging semantics, and robust string serialization/deserialization with input validation.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screentreerecursionparsing - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerRandomized String Multiset With Average O(1) Insert, Remove and Weighted Random Pick
Design a collection of strings that allows duplicates and supports insert, remove and a random pick in average constant time, where each stored occurrence is equally likely to be returned. It tests hash map and array layout, index bookkeeping on removal, and how string keys change the cost analysis.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - MercorMediumSoftware EngineerCharge-Then-Save: Making a Checkout Handler Safe Under Retries
Review a ticket-checkout handler that bills a card through a remote gateway and then saves an order row, explain every way it breaks when calls fail or are retried, and redesign it. Tests reasoning about partial failure, idempotency, and reconciliation.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screenidempotencydistributed-systemspayments - MercorMediumSoftware EngineerCode Review: A Ride Fare Method That Charges a Card Then Logs the Trip
Review a Java method that charges a rider's card through an external processor and then writes a trip record, and explain what goes wrong if the caller fails mid-call and how to fix it.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screencode-reviewidempotencydistributed-systems - MercorEasySoftware EngineerCode Review: Find the Problems in a Python Dict-Based Memoization Cache
A Python code review question about a function that memoizes an expensive computation in a module-level dictionary. It tests whether a candidate can find correctness, memory, concurrency and key-equality problems in simple caching code and propose fixes with clear trade-offs.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - MercorMediumSoftware EngineerCode Review: Improve a Java Method That Builds a CSV String
A Java code-reading question: review a short method that concatenates a list of rows into a CSV string and propose improvements. It tests knowledge of string-building performance, separator and escaping rules for CSV, null handling, streaming output for large exports, and risks when files are opened in spreadsheets.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - MercorMediumSoftware EngineerCode Review: Partial Failure in a Java Payment Method That Charges Then Records
A Java code-reading question about a payment method that charges an external provider and then inserts a database record, focused on what happens when the client fails in the middle of the call. It tests reasoning about partial failures, retries, idempotency keys, payment states, and reconciliation with the provider.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen
Instacart
Intuit
J.P. Morgan
Jane Street
LinkedIn
Mercor