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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.
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- 546
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- 11
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Showing 1231–1260 of 5874 results
- ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerChoose Between REST, WebSocket, and Server-Sent Events for an Agent Runtime
This question tests the ability to evaluate communication protocols based on specific architectural requirements, including bidirectional signaling, state recovery, and infrastructure overhead.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenSystem DesignProtocolsAPI Design - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerChoose Precision, Recall, or F1 for Agent Evaluation
This question tests the ability to map business objectives and error costs to appropriate classification metrics in a real-world system context.
Machine LearningTechnical ScreenMetricsClassificationModel Evaluation - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerClockwise Spiral Traversal of a Matrix With O(1) Extra Space and No Mutation
From a TikTok backend intern interview: return the elements of an m x n matrix in clockwise spiral order using only constant extra space beyond the output, without a visited marker and without modifying the matrix. It tests careful traversal logic and off-by-one handling when a single row or column remains.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerCompute root-to-leaf number sum
This problem tests your ability to perform depth-first search on a binary tree and maintain state (the current path sum) during the traversal to compute a cumulative total.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenTreesDFSRecursion - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerCount House Segments After Sequential Demolitions
Track the number of consecutive house segments after each requested demolition on an integer line. Each removal can eliminate an isolated segment, trim an endpoint, or split a run, so the solution must update the count efficiently across many distinct positions.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerCount Numbers with an Even Number of Digits
Count how many positive integers in an array have an even number of decimal digits. Respect ordinary representations without leading zeroes, count repeated values independently, and handle boundaries such as 10 and 10000 correctly.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnline Assessment - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerCount Similar Photo Groups
This question evaluates understanding of graph connectivity and equivalence relations, requiring recognition of connected components from an adjacency-matrix representation of pairwise similarity.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerCount Target-Sum Paths in an N-ary Tree
This problem tests the ability to navigate tree structures and use hash maps to track cumulative path sums efficiently, specifically in the context of an N-ary tree.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenTreesDFSPrefix Sum - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerCourse Schedule Feasibility
This problem tests the ability to detect cycles in a directed graph using topological sorting or Depth First Search, ensuring all task dependencies can be resolved.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteGraphTopological SortDFS - ByteDanceEasySoftware EngineerDebug and Extend a Priority-Aware Python Thread Pool
This question tests your understanding of thread-safe synchronization primitives, priority queues, and robust resource management in a multi-threaded Python environment.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteConcurrencyMultithreadingData Structures - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDefend a Project's Schema, Indexes, and Concurrency Model
Practice defending a database design by connecting schema choices, indexes, consistency behavior, and concurrency controls to concrete access patterns. The solution explains how to reason about CAP trade-offs, lost-update prevention, transaction boundaries, and the operational cost of each index.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceEasySoftware EngineerDescribe Over-Engineering and UX Wins
This question evaluates engineering judgment, trade-off analysis, and product-oriented UX skills by probing examples of over-engineering and measurable user-experience improvements.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe your most challenging project and leadership
This question evaluates leadership, project management, technical problem-solving, decision-making, and communication competencies by probing project goals, constraints, specific responsibilities, trade-offs, and outcomes.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign An Ad Creative Relationship Processing System
This question tests your ability to design a distributed asynchronous processing pipeline that manages entity relationships, handles API retries, and maintains state consistency across multiple dependent components.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsAsync ProcessingDatabase Schema - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Near-Real-Time Top Songs by Country
This question tests your ability to design a distributed streaming data pipeline that balances high-throughput ingestion with low-latency analytical queries for country-specific rankings.
System DesignOnsiteStreamingDistributed SystemsScalability - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a C++ Shared-Ownership Pointer Library
Explain shared-pointer control blocks, copy and move semantics, lifetime invariants, exception safety, and the limits of reference counting.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Configurable Order Validator with DAG Dependencies
This problem tests your ability to design a flexible, extensible rule-processing engine that handles sequential and interdependent validation logic.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenDesign PatternsDAGTopological Sort - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Content Moderation Platform
This problem evaluates your ability to design a scalable, multi-modal content moderation system that filters user-uploaded media using both automated ML inferences and human review workflows.
ML System DesignOnsiteSystem DesignMLOpsScalability - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Distributed Rate Limiter
This question tests the ability to design a scalable, low-latency rate limiting service that functions across multiple distributed application servers.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsCachingLatency - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a High-Frequency Job Scheduler
This question tests your ability to design a distributed, high-frequency job scheduling system that handles millions of tasks with varying priorities while ensuring reliability and strict execution guarantees.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsScalabilityConcurrency - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Monitoring Dashboard with Explicit Latency Goals
Design a monitoring dashboard that separates data freshness from query latency, with ingestion, rollups, browser updates, and stale-data handling.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment System: Time-Boxed High-Level Design
A time-boxed system design question asking for a high-level payment system that charges users through an external payment provider. It tests the end-to-end checkout flow, idempotent retries, a payment state machine and ledger, asynchronous provider notifications, reconciliation and failure handling.
System DesignOnsite - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a RAG-Based Agent System
This question tests the ability to architect a scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that handles document indexing, retrieval, and multi-step reasoning while maintaining low latency and data freshness.
ML System DesignTechnical ScreenRAGLLMSystem Design - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Real-Time Auction Platform
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a real-time, high-throughput distributed system focusing on API design, concurrency control, ordering guarantees, idempotency, persistence of bid history and state transitions, and real-time push/update mechanisms.
System DesignOnsite - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Short-Video Recommendation System
This problem tests the ability to design a multi-stage recommendation pipeline that balances real-time personalization, system latency, and content diversity.
ML System DesignOnsiteSystem DesignRecommendation SystemsScalability - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Synchronized Live Comment Overlay
Design a live comment overlay that stays synchronized with a video during live viewing, replay, seeking, and reconnects. Explore timeline semantics, stable ordering, scalable fanout, replay queries, moderation, backpressure, and graceful degradation during traffic bursts.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Ticket Booking System for High-Demand On-Sales Without Overselling
A system design question about a ticket booking system for high-demand on-sales. It probes how to absorb the traffic spike when sales open with load balancing, waiting rooms and rate limiting, and how to manage inventory with holds, payment-timeout release and consistent cache and database updates so that no ticket is ever sold twice.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a payment system with real-time holds, batch settlement and safe retries
System design question: design a payment system that places real-time holds on funds and settles them in batches, then explain how retries avoid double charges. It probes idempotency at every hop, payment state machines, double-entry ledgers, consistency across an external processor, reconciliation, and recovery from specific failures.
System DesignOnsite - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerDesign an E-Commerce Platform with Reliable Checkout
Design an e-commerce platform with searchable catalogs, carts, atomic inventory reservations, idempotent checkout, payment recovery, and reliable order state.
System DesignTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an RBAC Relational Schema
This problem tests your ability to design a normalized relational database schema that implements Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to support hierarchical users, roles, and resource-level permissions.
System DesignTechnical ScreenSQLDatabase SchemaRBAC