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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 331–360 of 2810 results
- AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerExplain CPU-Bound vs I/O-Bound Work
This question evaluates understanding of CPU-bound versus I/O-bound workloads and their interaction with concurrency models such as multithreading, asynchronous I/O, and multiprocessing in Python, including the impact of the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and relevance to tasks like web crawling, parsing, and heavy computation.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerFind duplicate files and apply image operations
This question evaluates skills in string parsing and content-based grouping for duplicate file detection, along with matrix manipulation for image operations like horizontal flips and box blur, covering competencies in algorithm design, data-structure selection, and numerical array transformations.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerFix a Corrupted Bootloader Instruction
Simulate a virtual machine's instruction set, detect an infinite loop cycle, and find the single instruction modification (between jmp and nop) that allows the program to terminate normally.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screensimulationgraphdepth-first-search - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerGenerate Function Profiling Events from Stack Samples
Generate function start and end events from timestamped stack samples, including independently debounced frames across consecutive samples. Address transient appearances and absences, changing stack suffixes, shared timestamps, deep stacks, end-of-input behavior, complexity, and online processing.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerGenerate outputs for images and pipelines
This question evaluates algorithmic and systems engineering skills related to batch image processing, parallelization, I/O versus CPU trade-offs, and deterministic output association within the Coding & Algorithms domain.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerHow would you scale batch image pipelines?
This problem evaluates your ability to design a distributed, fault-tolerant batch processing system for high-throughput image transformation tasks.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsScalabilityBatch Processing - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerIdentify and mitigate deduplication program risks
This question evaluates understanding of system design and practical engineering competencies required for building resilient file deduplication tools, covering filesystem semantics, error handling, hashing and collision considerations, concurrency, performance bottlenecks, cross-platform interoperability, and safety trade-offs.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement Task Management and Duplicate Detection
This problem tests your ability to design an in-memory task management system with concurrency-aware state tracking and implement an efficient file-deduplication routine using hashing.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenData StructuresHashingConcurrency - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement a Batch Image Processor
Design and implement an in-memory image transformation engine that applies sequential operations (grayscale, brightness scaling, nearest-neighbor resizing) over a batch of images efficiently.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenParallelismMultiprocessingImage Processing - AnthropicEasySoftware EngineerImplement a Duplicate-File Reporter
Implement an efficient file system scanner that identifies duplicate files while minimizing disk I/O and gracefully handling filesystem errors.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screenfile-systemio-optimizationhashing - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement a Parallel Image Processor
Design and implement a concurrent batch image processor that executes a sequence of matrix transforms across worker threads or processes while isolating per-job failures.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screenconcurrencymultithreadingfault-tolerance - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerImplement a Time-Aware Task Manager
Design an in-memory task manager supporting per-user task versioning, time-to-live (TTL) expiration, and point-in-time historical queries.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenBinary SearchData StructuresDesign - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerImplement hostname-restricted web crawler
This question evaluates skills in graph traversal and cycle detection, hostname-based filtering, URL parsing, and basic network error handling. Commonly asked in Coding & Algorithms interviews, it assesses algorithmic reasoning about traversal strategy and complexity (time and space) analysis while balancing conceptual understanding with practical implementation details.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerReview and Scale an Inference Service Design
Tests the ability to architect a high-throughput ML inference service under strict latency SLAs, including dynamic batching, hardware capacity estimation, admission control, and multi-model routing.
ML System DesignTechnical Screenml-system-designdistributed-systemsgpu-inference - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerRoute and Batch Inference with Eight GPUs
Design an inference routing, dynamic batching, and scheduling system across a fixed pool of eight 80GB GPUs serving both large and small language models under strict latency and memory constraints.
ML System DesignTechnical Screenml-systemsllm-inferencegpu-scheduling - AnthropicHardSoftware EngineerScale crawler with thread pool
This question evaluates system design and concurrent programming competencies, focusing on bounded thread-pool architecture, thread-safe frontier and deduplication structures, per-host politeness and in-flight limits, reliability mechanisms (timeouts, retries, backoff), and graceful shutdown and termination semantics.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerSolve programming task with follow-ups
This question evaluates algorithmic problem-solving skills, including core algorithm implementation, handling a consecutive-N-element constraint, and designing an optimization that leverages suffix-related information.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AnthropicMediumSoftware EngineerWhy Anthropic and its values?
This question evaluates a candidate's culture fit, value alignment, integrity under pressure, and critical thinking within the Behavioral & Leadership category for a software engineering role.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - AntraMediumSoftware EngineerCharacter Frequency Count in a String
This problem tests your ability to manipulate strings and utilize hash maps to count character frequencies while maintaining the original order of character appearance.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenStringsHash MapAlgorithms - AntraEasySoftware EngineerExplain core Java and Spring fundamentals
This question evaluates core competencies in Java and Spring, covering data structures and collections, object-oriented design (SOLID), hash-based collections and concurrency primitives, immutability and string handling, exception handling, Spring IoC/DI and AOP, bean lifecycle and annotations, and functional collection processing via the Stream API. Commonly asked in Software Engineering Fundamentals interviews for backend Java/Spring roles, it checks both conceptual understanding and practical application by assessing architectural reasoning, concurrency and thread-safety knowledge, and familiarity with framework conventions and APIs.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - AntraMediumSoftware EngineerJava and Object-Oriented Design Fundamentals
This problem tests your understanding of interface design, the Liskov Substitution Principle, and proper usage of Java Collections in a Spring-managed context.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenJavaSpringSOLID - AntraMediumSoftware EngineerLongest Substring Without Repeating Characters
This problem tests your ability to implement an efficient sliding window technique using a hash map to track character indices and maintain a valid substring constraint.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenSliding WindowHash MapString - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerAnswer OoO, caches, and memory-system questions
This question evaluates core computer-architecture and system-level skills—covering out-of-order execution structures, branch prediction (gshare) mechanics, register renaming/RAT tracing, VLIW versus superscalar tradeoffs, cache coherence protocols, load/store subsystem behavior, copy-on-write after fork, cache indexing math, VIPT aliasing, and asynchronous FIFO design—and is categorized under Software Engineering Fundamentals. It is commonly asked because it probes a candidate’s microarchitectural and OS understanding, performance reasoning, and ability to explain low-level (microarchitecture and system-level) concepts and interactions without requiring full ISA-specific implementations.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - AppleEasySoftware EngineerCafe Open-Now Check: Split Shifts and Midnight-Crossing Hours
Build an 'is the cafe open right now' check across three stages of growing complexity -- one fixed daily window, then select weekdays, then multiple shifts per day including windows that cross midnight. Tests clean incremental time modeling more than any single clever algorithm.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screentimemodelingintervals - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerCapture Enclosed O Regions in an X/O Grid Using Union-Find Instead of Flood Fill
Given a grid of X and O cells, capture every region of edge-connected O cells that does not touch the border by turning it into X, using a disjoint-set (union-find) structure instead of flood fill. Tests union-find implementation, mapping grid cells to set indices and correct border handling.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerCloud Provider Design for Provisioning Resources Through Terraform
A cloud infrastructure design question asking what a cloud provider must build so customers can create, update and destroy its resources with Terraform. It tests mapping the Terraform resource lifecycle to provider APIs, handling long-running operations and their status, idempotent retries, and drift detection.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AppleHardSoftware EngineerCompute conflicts and minimum meeting rooms
This question evaluates the ability to reason about interval overlaps and resource allocation, testing algorithmic thinking and efficient handling of time-interval data in scheduling contexts and belongs to the Coding & Algorithms domain.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerCompute island size in grid
This interview question evaluates algorithm design, data structures, correctness, complexity, edge cases, and implementation details in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Compute island size in grid states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerCompute minimum required meeting rooms
This question evaluates understanding of interval scheduling and resource-allocation concepts, proficiency with data structures for detecting temporal overlaps (heap and sweep-line paradigms), and the ability to analyze time and space complexity while handling edge cases.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AppleMediumSoftware EngineerCompute top three scores per student
This interview question evaluates algorithm design, data structures, correctness, complexity, edge cases, and implementation details in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Compute top three scores per student states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
Anthropic
Apple