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Software Engineer 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
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Showing 481–510 of 1189 results
- HadrianHardSoftware EngineerMigrate a Continuously Used Database
This question tests your ability to design a zero-downtime database migration strategy that handles heterogeneous database engines while maintaining strict data consistency across concurrent read and write operations.
System DesignOnsiteDatabase MigrationCDCConsistency - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Cloud File Storage
This question tests your ability to design a scalable cloud file storage and collaboration platform, focusing on the architectural separation between metadata and blob storage, chunking, deduplication, and granular access control.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsObject StorageAccess Control - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign File Storage with Metadata, Access Control, and Chunked Uploads
Design drive-style file storage with metadata and blob separation, ACL checks, resumable chunk uploads, atomic publication, and version conflicts.
System DesignOnsite - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud File Storage Service
This question evaluates competency in designing large-scale distributed file storage and collaboration systems, covering storage and metadata modeling, API design, synchronization and consistency models, resumable large-file handling, versioning, access control, scalability, availability, durability, and security.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a RAG question-answering system
Design an enterprise-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system capable of answering complex natural language queries over millions of internal documents with high precision, low latency, and verifiable citations.
System DesignOnsiteRAGVector DatabaseInformation Retrieval - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Secure PDF Data Room
Design an enterprise-grade virtual data room (VDR) for secure legal document sharing, focusing on multi-tenant access control, instant permission revocation, dynamic watermarking, and tamper-evident audit logging.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designsecurityauthorization - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDesign a production file storage service
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and storage architecture, covering metadata schema design, concurrency control for atomic per-directory limits and renaming, transaction boundaries and idempotency, storage models for file bytes, large-file handling, consistency and failure modes, scalability and partitioning, observability, lifecycle management, and security. It is in the System Design domain and is commonly asked because it reveals how a candidate reasons about architectural trade-offs and practical implementation concerns; it tests both high-level conceptual design and hands-on practical application.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDetermine identical files ignoring metadata
A Harvey AI system design screen on determining whether two files are byte-identical while ignoring metadata, then scaling to deduplication. It covers hashing algorithm choice (SHA-256/BLAKE3 vs MD5/xxHash), multi-stage verification, collision and false-positive mitigation, streaming and parallel hashing, content-defined chunking, and persistent hash-index/service design.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HeadwayMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Rental Search and Booking Platform from Startup to Scale
Design a short-term rental search and booking system, balancing eventual consistency in search discovery with strict consistency during reservations and checkout.
System DesignTechnical Screensystem-designconcurrencydistributed-systems - HeadwayMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Shopping Cart Service That Keeps Inventory Consistent Under Concurrency
Design the backend for an online store's shopping cart, with the focus on inventory consistency: when stock is reserved, how two shoppers racing for the last unit are resolved, and how abandoned holds are released. It tests data modeling, concurrency control, checkout failure handling and contention on popular items.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HeadwayMediumSoftware EngineerHandle traffic spikes and estimate server capacity
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in performance troubleshooting, capacity planning, and scalable system architecture, focusing on diagnosing overload causes and quantifying infrastructure needs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HebbiaMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Multi-Agent Chat Backend
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable backend architectures that integrate LLMs and multi-agent orchestration, covering distributed systems, streaming responses, conversation context management, tool integrations, observability, and secure handling of sensitive financial data.
System DesignOnsite - HexMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Notebook App That Synchronizes Notes
This question tests the ability to design a resilient client-server architecture for a collaborative editing application that must function reliably under network instability.
System DesignOnsiteOffline-firstSynchronizationConcurrency - HexMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an In-Flight Entertainment Experience for a Small Screen
This problem tests the ability to design a high-availability, accessible, and modular UI/UX system under significant physical and connectivity constraints.
System DesignOnsiteUI/UXEmbedded SystemsArchitecture - Hot Agent StartupMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Flight Booking and Voting Systems
This question evaluates system design competencies including large-scale backend architecture, data modeling and indexing, database internals, concurrency control to prevent overselling, and high-throughput real-time streaming and metrics for live updates.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Netflix-like streaming platform
A HubSpot software-engineer onsite system-design question: design a Netflix-like video streaming platform covering catalog browse by genre and curated rails (Recently Added, Top Ten), search, adaptive-bitrate playback across web, mobile and TV, cross-device resume, and an upload-to-streamable ingest pipeline. It evaluates service decomposition, data models and API contracts, transcoding and CMAF/multi-DRM packaging, CDN and caching strategy, session concurrency and consistency, multi-region failover, observability and A/B testing, graceful degradation, and cost control at millions of concurrent viewers. The worked solution sizes egress and heartbeat load, corrects the common concurrency, resume, and cache-TTL mistakes, and marks the MVP cut line.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotHardSoftware EngineerDesign a near-real-time weather API
A HubSpot onsite system-design question: build a weather data platform that ingests hourly dumps for ~2,000 U.S. locations and serves the current temperature with an at-most-10-minute freshness SLA. It tests ingestion pipelines, idempotent retries and backfill, caching and invalidation, storage modeling, rate-limit handling, scaling, and observability on freshness SLOs.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotEasySoftware EngineerDesign an hourly weather crawling service
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable data ingestion and delivery systems, covering competencies such as scheduling and crawling, data normalization, storage schema design, idempotent ingestion, rate limiting, retries, and monitoring.
System DesignOnsite - HubSpotMediumSoftware EngineerSchedule and execute future payments
This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Schedule and execute future payments states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnline Assessment - IBMHardSoftware EngineerDesign a multithreaded CPU 1D convolution
An IBM software-engineer take-home that asks you to design and implement a multithreaded CPU version of valid 1D convolution across three regimes: a tiny kernel (K=3), a kernel as long as the input (K=N, a single dot product), and a 100-thread cap. It evaluates parallel decomposition, scheduling, cache locality, false-sharing avoidance, SIMD vectorization, and reduction/synchronization choices.
System DesignOnline Assessment - IllumioMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Multicloud Publishing and API Gateway
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that reliably replicates data from a primary database to multiple cloud providers while exposing a unified, secure API gateway for external consumers.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsAPI GatewayCDC - IllumioHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Time-Series Database
This problem tests the ability to architect a high-throughput, horizontally scalable system for time-series data, balancing ingest performance with efficient range-query capability.
System DesignOnsiteTime-SeriesDistributed SystemsIndexing - ImcMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an in-memory hotel booking system
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design in-memory data models, concurrency control mechanisms, and temporal reservation logic for booking systems.
System DesignTechnical Screen - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Idempotent In-App Availability and Due-Date Notifications
Design asynchronous in-app availability alerts and due-date reminders with Celery, Redis, durable idempotency, versioned schedules, and crash recovery.
System DesignOnline Assessment - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Inventory Service with Reservations, Hot SKUs and Oversell Prevention
A system design question about an inventory management service that reserves stock while customers check out. It tests how a candidate prevents overselling under concurrent updates, handles hot SKUs, manages reservation expiry and idempotency, and supports partial fulfillment of multi-item orders.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an Inventory Service with Stock Reservations That Prevents Overselling
A system design discussion of an inventory service that reserves stock for orders, centered on reservations, concurrent updates and preventing overselling. It probes how stock and holds are modeled, how a reservation stays atomic under contention, how abandoned holds are released and how hot items scale.
System DesignTechnical Screen - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an inventory management system
This question evaluates competency in system design, data modeling, distributed consistency, concurrency control, API design, idempotency, and scalability for backend inventory and reservation workflows.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an inventory system
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing inventory and distributed systems, covering stock tracking models, reservation and commit semantics, concurrency control, data modeling, API design, and real-time integrations.
System DesignHR Screen - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerDesign and Release a Consistent Dark-Store Inventory System
Design a strongly consistent micro-fulfillment (dark-store) inventory system that handles reservations, stock reconciliation, and idempotent retries, alongside a zero-downtime deployment strategy.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-transactionsinventory-management - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign cloud storage with quotas and compression
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a multi-tenant cloud storage system, testing competencies in API design, quota accounting, compression strategies, distributed storage architecture (partitioning, replication/erasure coding), consistency models, security, versioning, and observability.
System DesignOnline Assessment
Harvey
HubSpot
IBM
Imc
Instacart