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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
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 1021–1050 of 1189 results
- SalesforceHardSoftware EngineerDesign secure Kubernetes with CI/CD
This question evaluates expertise in Kubernetes architecture, cluster operations and troubleshooting, security hardening, and CI/CD pipeline design for managed Kubernetes clusters, covering control plane and node responsibilities, incident diagnosis, access and network policies, secret management, image integrity, and progressive delivery mechanisms. It is commonly asked to assess operational and security judgment and design thinking, testing both conceptual understanding of distributed control and security models and practical application in real-world CI/CD and incident-response scenarios within the System Design domain.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SalesforceMediumSoftware EngineerWalk Through the Architecture of the Project You Work on Now
A design-round prompt asking you to walk through the architecture of the project you currently work on: its purpose, components, request and data flows, technology choices, scale and failure handling, and your own part in it. It assesses clarity, ownership and depth under probing.
System DesignOnsite - Scale AIEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Streaming Job Scheduler
This question evaluates task scheduling, deadline-based prioritization, dependency management, and distributed coordination competencies, encompassing algorithmic/data-structure reasoning as well as correctness under concurrency and failure conditions.
System DesignTechnical Screen - Scale AIMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a large-scale ticketing system
This question evaluates skills in large-scale system design, including distributed systems, concurrency control, transactional correctness, data modeling, API design, and integration with external payment providers.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ScribdMediumSoftware EngineerProduct Event Tracking and Analytics Pipeline With Flexible Schema and Retention
This question tests the architectural design of a scalable event-tracking pipeline capable of handling heterogeneous JSON schemas, choosing appropriate storage tiers for analytical queries, and managing data lifecycle policies.
System DesignOnsiteData PipelineSchema DesignStorage - Sentry.IoMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Book Purchase Broker
This problem tests the ability to design a resilient distributed system that orchestrates third-party API calls, handles partial failures, and ensures transactional integrity across asynchronous boundaries.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsAPIsAsync Processing - ShopifyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Product Photography Upload Service
Design a product-photography workflow from shoot creation and direct upload through processing, merchant review, acceptance, and reshoots. Cover scoped upload authorization, authoritative metadata, idempotent state transitions, stale completion events, notifications, retention, and publication safety.
System DesignOnsite - ShopifyHardSoftware EngineerDesign a rare-book lending and returns system
Design a rare-book lending and returns 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 - ShopifyMediumSoftware EngineerScaling a Collision-Free Rover Fleet to a Million Robots
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system that manages real-time state consistency across a massive, sharded spatial grid while handling concurrency and robot movement.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsConcurrencySharding - ShopifyMediumSoftware EngineerTechnical Deep Dive: Present a System You Built as a Design Retrospective
A senior engineering interview round in which you present a system you designed or led, using a diagram prepared in advance, and then defend it under questioning. It tests how you frame the problem and your ownership, explain key decisions and their alternatives, discuss failures honestly, and go deep on any component.
System DesignOnsite - SierraMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an LLM-Powered Customer Service Chat System with Robust Failure Handling
A system design interview for a customer-service chat system whose replies come from an external LLM provider. It walks through the end-to-end happy path and publish/subscribe message delivery, then focuses on error handling when the provider partially fails or the network drops, on both the server and the client.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Column-Queryable KV Database
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed key-value storage system that supports efficient column-based filtering and range scans, balancing write performance against analytical query capabilities.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsNoSQLStorage - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Metrics System
Design a high-throughput, low-latency metrics collection, aggregation, and querying platform. The question tests your ability to handle multi-dimensional time-series data, mitigate high-cardinality label explosions, and design tiered storage for varying query windows.
System DesignOnsiteTime SeriesDistributed SystemsScalability - SnapchatHardSoftware EngineerDesign a News Aggregator
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable content ingestion and distribution systems, encompassing API-driven fetching, scheduling, deduplication, storage, ranking, freshness guarantees, API rate limiting, and efficient article serving.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Pre-Login Risk and Challenge Service
Design a low-latency, resilient pre-login security service that evaluates risk signals, issues dynamic verification challenges, and verifies responses without exposing authentication flows to replay attacks.
System DesignOnsiteSecurityDistributed SystemsAuthentication - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a device owner lookup service
This question tests the ability to design a distributed system for tracking the mapping between ephemeral devices and their currently signed-in users, focusing on handling event concurrency and high-throughput read/write operations.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsConcurrencyCaching - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a metrics collection and alerting system
This question evaluates system design competencies such as scalable time-series data modeling, ingestion and storage architecture, query latency versus retention trade-offs, and alert evaluation logic within the System Design domain.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatHardSoftware EngineerDesign a streaming ads system
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing low-latency, scalable, and privacy-compliant ad-insertion platforms, encompassing distributed systems, real-time bidding integration, ad format and measurement standards, content and identity signal processing, pacing/frequency control, and multi-region fault tolerance.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a swipeable video feed backend
This question evaluates system-design competence for building scalable, low-latency backend services that handle feed vending, pagination, personalized ranking, caching, storage, and content eligibility; it is categorized under System Design and tests practical application of distributed systems and backend data engineering principles.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatHardSoftware EngineerDesign product co-occurrence analytics API
This question evaluates design skills for RESTful APIs and backend systems, covering API schema and versioning, authentication and rate limiting, caching and cache invalidation, storage models, precomputation pipelines, consistency and staleness bounds, monitoring, and operational concerns.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatMediumSoftware EngineerDesign real-time ad impression and spend tracking
This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, fault-tolerant system capable of tracking massive volumes of ad impression events and calculating real-time budget spending.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsCachingHigh Throughput - SnapchatHardSoftware EngineerDesign ride-hailing and price alert systems
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in large-scale system design, including distributed architecture, real-time data processing, geo-spatial indexing and low-latency matching for ride-hailing, plus scalable ingestion, time-series storage, rule evaluation, and reliable notification pipelines for price-tracking, within the System Design domain. It is commonly asked to assess architectural trade-offs around scalability, consistency, availability, fault tolerance and operational concerns, testing practical application of architectural patterns alongside conceptual understanding of data modeling and real-time constraints.
System DesignOnsite - SnapchatHardSoftware EngineerDesign short URL service with click counting
This question tests the ability to design a distributed URL shortening service, focusing on system architecture, database partitioning, and strategies for high-frequency write operations like click tracking.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityDatabaseCaching - SnapchatHardSoftware EngineerParallelize the lock BFS safely
Parallelize the lock BFS safely 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 DesignTechnical Screen - SnowflakeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cron Job Scheduler
This question evaluates skills in designing reliable distributed schedulers, including durable state modeling, concurrency and race-condition reasoning, idempotency, and fault-tolerant handoff semantics, and is commonly asked to assess a candidate's ability to guarantee correctness and coordination when multiple replicas must manage recurring job triggers. Categorized under system design and distributed systems with overlap into data modeling and consistency, it emphasizes practical application of architectural and operational trade-offs rather than purely theoretical concepts.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SnowflakeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Job Scheduler with Cron, Pause and Resume
Design a job scheduler service that runs one-time and cron jobs, supports pausing and resuming, and dispatches work to an unlimited pool of workers. It tests due-job indexing, claim and lease protocols, pause semantics, at-least-once execution with idempotency, and handling top-of-the-hour spikes.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SnowflakeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Geolocation Search Service
This question tests your ability to design a scalable spatial indexing system capable of performing range-based queries (e.g., 'find all points of interest within 5km') while maintaining high availability and low latency.
System DesignTechnical ScreenGeolocationIndexingScalability - SnowflakeMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Photo Album Backend: Upload Consistency, Deduplication and Scaling
A backend system design prompt for a photo album service where users upload photos and organize them into albums. It probes keeping a metadata database and blob storage consistent on upload, showing new photos instantly despite processing lag, blocking duplicate uploads, and when a relational database stops scaling.
System DesignOnsite - SnowflakeHardSoftware EngineerDesign a REST API Abstraction Layer
This question evaluates system design and API design competencies, focusing on creating a REST API abstraction layer and internal SDK that address cross-cutting concerns like reliability, observability, security, versioning, and contract/interface modeling.
System DesignTechnical Screen - SnowflakeHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Reliable Job Scheduler
This problem tests the ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant job scheduler capable of handling task persistence, concurrency, and strict timing requirements at scale.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsConcurrencyFault Tolerance
Salesforce
Scale AI
Shopify
Sierra
Snapchat
Snowflake