practice a little every day, paws crossed ♡
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
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 1771–1800 of 2336 results
- Otter.AiMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Fault-Tolerant Meeting Bot Allocation System
Design the infrastructure between a web UI and a bot pool. Connect requirements and APIs to data modeling, consistency, scaling, failure recovery, observability, and the important design trade-offs.
System DesignOnsite - Otter.AiMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Google Docs-Style Real-Time Collaborative Editing Backend
Design the backend of a Google Docs-style editor in which many users edit the same document in real time and every copy converges to the same text. Tests concurrency control for simultaneous edits, routing of document sessions, operation storage and revision history, presence, and recovery from disconnects and server failures.
System DesignOnsite - Otter.AiMediumSoftware EngineerFewest Adjacent-GCD Operations to Turn Every Array Element into 1
Given an array of positive integers, find the fewest operations that make every element 1, where each operation replaces one of two neighboring values with their greatest common divisor, or return -1 if it cannot be done. Tests GCD properties, lower-bound reasoning and careful case analysis on small arrays.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - PalantirEasySoftware EngineerDesign a Server Metrics Monitor
This question evaluates knowledge of distributed system design, scheduling and orchestration, concurrency, fault tolerance, and observability in the context of large-scale metric collection.
System DesignOnsite - PalantirMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a compliant multi-tenant analytics platform
This question tests the ability to design a secure, scalable multi-tenant analytics platform that enforces strict data isolation and fine-grained access control while maintaining rigorous audit trails.
System DesignOnsiteMulti-tenancySecurityABAC - PalantirEasySoftware EngineerFind Shortest Paths in Road Network
This question evaluates understanding of graph data structures and shortest-path concepts, including correct modeling of undirected edges, unweighted versus weighted pathfinding, and algorithmic time and space complexity.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - PalantirMediumSoftware EngineerHandle value conflicts and disagreeing with leadership
This question evaluates ethical judgment, professional disagreement, stakeholder communication, and ownership/accountability within leadership and team contexts for software engineers.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe background and resume highlights
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to communicate professional background concisely, demonstrate incident ownership and leadership, articulate technical decisions and trade-offs, and quantify measurable impact relevant to secure, high-availability systems within the Behavioral & Leadership domain of software engineering.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Scheduler and Metrics Platform
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design cloud-native distributed systems, covering job scheduling, lifecycle management, observability, persistence, resource-aware placement, retry semantics, and multi-tenant security for containerized workloads.
System DesignOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksEasySoftware EngineerDesign a device configuration system
This question evaluates system design and distributed systems competency, including API design, storage modeling, rollout workflows, operational behavior, and consistency trade-offs for device configuration management.
System DesignOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksHardSoftware EngineerDesign an ML inference orchestration platform
This question evaluates system-design and ML infrastructure competencies, focusing on orchestration of multi-model inference workflows, distributed data flow and storage, versioning and model management, scaling and deployment, failure handling, observability, and multi-tenant security and quota management.
ML System DesignOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerFind Maximum Rectangle in Bar Chart
This question evaluates algorithmic problem-solving and data structure proficiency in computing the maximum rectangular area within a histogram-like array, focusing on contiguous segment analysis and range-based aggregation.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerFind normalized list difference efficiently
This question evaluates competency in computing normalized list differences, including string normalization, collection comparison, duplicate handling, and time and space complexity reasoning.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - Palo Alto NetworksMediumSoftware EngineerMirror a binary tree and analyze complexity
This question evaluates understanding of binary tree manipulation and traversal methods, emphasizing recursion and iterative approaches as well as the ability to reason about time and space complexity.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - ParafinHardSoftware EngineerDesign a loan application system
Design a loan application 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 - ParafinHardSoftware EngineerDesign loan application system
This question evaluates architecture and systems engineering competencies related to building scalable, compliant financial platforms, including data modeling, API and event-driven workflow design, security, and regulatory integration.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cross-Border Money Transfer Service
This question evaluates proficiency in designing distributed, fault-tolerant payment systems with competencies in payments flows, exchange-rate management, compliance and regulatory constraints, transactional integrity, idempotency, scalability, reliability, and observability.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Payment Fraud Detection Service
This system design question tests the ability to architect a real-time, low-latency fraud decisioning service that combines deterministic rule engines with machine learning model scores. It evaluates practical understanding of distributed systems trade-offs, feature store design, and safe model/rule deployment on a high-availability critical path.
System DesignOnsite - PayPalMediumSoftware EngineerMinimize a String Using Allowed Swaps
This question evaluates understanding of graph connectivity and constrained string reordering, along with proficiency in applying efficient data structures and algorithms for handling large inputs.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - PerplexityMediumSoftware EngineerDesign personalized discovery recommendations
This problem evaluates your ability to design a scalable, real-time recommendation system that balances personalization with content discovery in an information-seeking environment.
ML System DesignOnsiteRecommender SystemsML InfrastructureRanking - PerplexityMediumSoftware EngineerDesign trending queries ranking system
This question tests the ability to design a high-throughput, real-time pipeline that identifies and ranks trending search queries, requiring trade-offs between freshness, accuracy, and system latency.
ML System DesignOnsiteSystem DesignReal-time StreamingRanking - PerplexityHardSoftware EngineerIn-Memory File System: Strict mkdir, touch, ls, rm, rmdir and a Command Runner
A two-part coding exercise to build an in-memory file system: first mkdir, touch and ls with strict path validation and no implicit creation of parent directories, then rm, rmdir and a function that executes command sequences. It tests tree modeling, error handling and working against provided tests.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - PersistenceMediumSoftware EngineerExplain Lazy Loading and Frontend Code Splitting
This question tests your understanding of performance optimization techniques in large-scale frontend applications, specifically how to balance initial load time against runtime latency.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteFrontendPerformanceArchitecture - PersistenceMediumSoftware EngineerReason About Indexes, Kafka, and Database Locking
Tests practical database indexing, Kafka event ingestion with idempotency guarantees, and row-level locking strategies to prevent concurrency bugs and deadlocks in an inventory and order processing pipeline.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteDatabasesPostgreSQLKafka - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerAI-Assisted Coding: Add a Read-Through Cache for a Product GET API in an Existing Repo
In an AI-assisted coding round, add a read-through cache to an existing service so a product GET API calls ProductRepository less often, then explain the approach. It tests understanding a codebase before prompting, cache placement, expiry, invalidation and concurrency, and proving the change works.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerBehavioral Deep Dive: Owned Project Metrics, Fast Decisions, Feedback, and Conflict
Tests an engineering candidate's end-to-end technical leadership, ownership mindset, quantitative impact tracking, decision-making velocity under uncertainty, and interpersonal maturity.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsiteBehavioralLeadershipSystem Ownership - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerBehavioral Round: Success Metrics, Slow Teammates, Team Health, Feedback and Conflict
Prepare concise answers for a software engineer behavioral round covering how you defined a project's success metrics, leading and communicating with engineers, a slow teammate, good and poor teams, giving and receiving negative feedback, conflict, and your strongest quality. It tests specific, well-structured stories with clear ownership and measurable outcomes.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerBuild an emoji blaster animation on iOS
This question evaluates a developer's skills in iOS UI interaction, animation frameworks, event scheduling and concurrency, performance optimization, and designing testable application architecture.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite - PinterestMediumSoftware EngineerCompute reachable cells for a cleaning robot
This problem tests graph traversal techniques (BFS/DFS) on a 2D grid, focusing on efficient coordinate management and state representation when navigating obstacles.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteBFSGraph Traversal2D Grid - PinterestHardSoftware EngineerCount Distinct Active Pins per Time Segment from Overlapping Interaction Logs
Process overlapping pin interaction logs to calculate the number of distinct active pins over continuous time segments. Tests interval merging, line sweep techniques, and boundary handling.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsitesweep-lineintervalssorting
Otter.Ai
Palantir
Palo Alto Networks
PayPal
Perplexity
Pinterest