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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
- Questions
- 546
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- 11
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Showing 511–540 of 1189 results
- InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign product catalog service
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 Design product catalog service states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerDesign scalable inventory system and avoid races
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, highly available distributed systems with robust concurrency control and consistency reasoning, covering architecture, data modeling, caching, message-based integration, and operational concerns like observability and disaster recovery.
System DesignOnsite - InstacartMediumSoftware EngineerReserve Cart Inventory Without Overselling
Design a high-throughput inventory reservation system that locks stock when items are added to a cart, prevents overselling during flash promotions, handles automatic reservation expiration, and scales seamlessly under a 10x traffic spike.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsconcurrency - InstacartHardSoftware EngineerTroubleshoot a production incident end-to-end
Troubleshoot a production incident end-to-end evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - IntuitMediumSoftware EngineerScale a service you just built: schema trade-offs, new features, indexes, and search
System design deep dive on scaling a service built earlier in the same interview loop. Compare schema options, extend the data model for reviews, ratings, and keyword search, and reason about query performance, indexing, pagination, and when a dedicated search engine is worth adding.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Rate Limiter: Algorithm Trade-offs, Scalability and Availability
A high-level design question on a rate limiter that compares common limiting algorithms and then scales the chosen one across many servers while staying available. It tests trade-off reasoning about accuracy, memory, burst handling, shared state, and what happens when the limiter's own dependencies fail.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Reliable Bank Payment System
Design a reliable bank payment system that remains correct across retries, crashes, duplicate requests, and ambiguous external-rail timeouts. Define idempotent APIs, a durable state machine and ledger, transactional handoff, safe reconciliation, invariant monitoring, auditability, and operator remediation.
System DesignOnsite - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scalable Notification System
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed, asynchronous notification system capable of handling high-throughput multi-channel messaging while maintaining strict delivery guarantees and rate-limiting policies.
System DesignOnsiteScalabilityMessage QueuesDistributed Systems - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL shortener
This question assesses the ability to design a distributed URL shortening service, focusing on database schema design, collision resolution, and caching strategies for high-read throughput.
System DesignTechnical ScreenCachingDatabasesHashing - J.P. MorganEasySoftware EngineerDesign an Auditable Internal AI Chatbot
Design an enterprise RAG-based AI assistant that enforces role-based document access control, bounds conversation history, mitigates prompt injection, and maintains an immutable, compliance-grade audit trail.
System DesignTechnical ScreenRAGSecurityCompliance - J.P. MorganMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an E-Commerce Shopping Website
This problem tests your ability to design a scalable, consistent backend architecture for an e-commerce platform, focusing on inventory management, order processing, and high-read traffic handling.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityDatabaseMicroservices - J.P. MorganEasySoftware EngineerImprove shopping cart latency and stock notifications
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, low-latency e-commerce architectures and real-time notification mechanisms while reasoning about data consistency, concurrency control, and correctness under high traffic (including concerns like avoiding oversells).
System DesignOnline Assessment - Jane StreetEasySoftware EngineerDesign exchange–trading system message flow
This question evaluates a candidate's knowledge of distributed messaging protocols, fault-tolerant system design, and financial trading interface competencies, including defining message contracts, session management, and guarantees like idempotency and ordering.
System DesignOnsite - Jane StreetMediumSoftware EngineerProcess One Million Quote Updates per Second
Design a low-latency market data processing engine capable of ingesting 1,000,000 quote updates per second across multiple exchanges, maintaining global best bids and asks, and triggering immediate cross-venue arbitrage alerts.
System DesignTechnical ScreenLow LatencyConcurrencyTrading Systems - Jane StreetEasySoftware EngineerValidate order book data across multiple databases
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing data-validation and reconciliation systems for financial order books, including defining invariants, ensuring cross-database consistency, and handling edge cases like partial fills, cancels, out-of-order events, duplicates, and replayed messages.
System DesignOnsite - KneronMediumSoftware EngineerOptimize machines for distributed merging cost
Optimize machines for distributed merging cost evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnline Assessment - LambdaHardSoftware EngineerDesign and explain infra, K8s, routing, and fleet
This question evaluates system design and infrastructure engineering skills, including Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD for bare-metal and Kubernetes, secrets management, idempotency and drift control, Kubernetes control-plane and workload management, edge firmware and fleet OTA management, IP routing and troubleshooting, and the ability to demonstrate automation, networking, observability, and security through a homelab. It is commonly asked to assess operational design thinking, scalability, security, reliability, and troubleshooting across distributed systems, falls under the System Design and Platform Engineering domain, and tests both conceptual understanding of control-plane and networking principles and practical application of operational guardrails and rollout strategies.
System DesignHR Screen - LangchainMediumSoftware EngineerOptimize Object-Backed APIs and Design an LLM Observability Platform
Design a high-throughput LLM observability and tracing platform that reliably captures spans, aggregates token billing, and provides low-latency trace retrieval over an object-storage backend.
System DesignOnsiteObservabilityObject StorageStreaming - LatentHardSoftware EngineerAdd Status, Pharmacist Worklists, and Digests to Prior Authorization
Design an event-driven prior authorization platform supporting real-time status tracking, prioritized pharmacist worklists, and scheduled email digests powered by asynchronous payer integrations.
System DesignTechnical ScreenEvent-DrivenHealthcareDistributed Systems - Lead BankMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Room-Level Hotel Reservations Without Double Booking
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed reservation system that ensures strong consistency for inventory management while handling high-concurrency read operations.
System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyDatabaseDistributed Systems - Lead BankMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a hotel reservation system
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed reservation system that handles high concurrency, prevents double-booking, and maintains eventual consistency with external payment services.
System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyDistributed SystemsDatabase Modeling - LeagueMediumSoftware EngineerDesign scalable insurance claims processing system
Walks through designing a scalable insurance claims processing system: ingestion, validation, routing, and the reliability and consistency trade-offs. Includes a worked system design solution.
System DesignTechnical Screen - LegoraMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Direct File Uploads for a Chat Application
Design a scalable direct-to-object-store file upload pipeline for a chat platform, focusing on presigned authorization, durable lifecycle tracking, asynchronous validation, and orphan reconciliation.
System DesignOnsiteObject StorageFile UploadDistributed Systems - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerBlock Malicious IPs at an API Gateway Across Data Centers
Design gateway IP-block enforcement with trusted client addresses, versioned rules, fast local checks, expiration, and multi-data-center propagation.
System DesignOnsite - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerCollect and Query Recent User Activity
Design a scalable user activity ingestion and querying system capable of computing metrics over rolling time windows (1 minute, 1 hour, 24 hours) with deduplication and late-arriving event handling.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemsstream-processing - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Keyword Search over Posts with Exclusions and Frequency Ranking
A system design question on keyword search over social posts: find the posts that contain a keyword without scanning them all, support queries that require one keyword and exclude another, and order results by how often the keywords appear. Tests indexing, query evaluation, sharding, pagination and ranking trade-offs.
System DesignOnsite - LinkedInHardSoftware EngineerDesign Top K ranking system
Design Top K ranking system evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a CI/CD Task Scheduler
Design the core distributed task scheduling engine for an enterprise CI/CD platform that coordinates DAG-based workflows across heterogeneous worker pools.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsTask SchedulingCI/CD - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Calendar System
Tests your ability to design a scalable calendar backend that supports single and recurring events, attendee invitations, and time-based reminder notifications with timezone awareness.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsData ModelingScheduling - LinkedInMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Key-Value Store for a Small Company's Internal Use
Design a distributed key-value store for internal use at a small company. The question tests comparing centralized, decentralized and hybrid architectures, and depth on partitioning, rebalancing, replication, failure handling, consistency, hot keys and availability at a senior infrastructure level.
System DesignOnsite
Instacart
Intuit
J.P. Morgan
Jane Street
LinkedIn