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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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Showing 2551–2580 of 5874 results
- HackerRankMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a URL Shortener
This question assesses the ability to design a URL shortening service (like Bitly) focusing on scalability, distributed ID generation, and efficient data retrieval.
System DesignTechnical ScreenScalabilityDatabaseCaching - HackerRankMediumSoftware EngineerFind Final Ball Holder
This problem tests your ability to optimize repeated state transitions by identifying cycles in a functional graph or using modular arithmetic to jump through large steps.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenMathModulo ArithmeticSimulation - HadrianHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Rule-Driven Process Graph Validator
This problem tests your ability to model dependency constraints in a directed graph and implement an efficient algorithm to validate that a given execution sequence satisfies all structural and ordering requirements.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteGraphsValidationAlgorithms - HadrianHardSoftware EngineerMigrate a Continuously Used Database
This question tests your ability to design a zero-downtime database migration strategy that handles heterogeneous database engines while maintaining strict data consistency across concurrent read and write operations.
System DesignOnsiteDatabase MigrationCDCConsistency - HadrianHardSoftware EngineerWork Order Lead Time: Critical Path Through an Operations DAG to Shipping
A manufacturing work order is modeled as a directed acyclic graph of operations with durations in days, and every path ends at one shipping node. Compute the total lead time as the critical path length from any starting operation to shipping. It tests graph modeling, dependency ordering and longest-path reasoning.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerBuild an In-Memory File Vault with Duplicate-Name Handling
Design an in-memory hierarchical file vault supporting automatic directory creation, lexicographical directory listings, and duplicate-name resolution using the smallest available numeric suffix.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteTrieDesignTree - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDefend a Project Decision and Its Trade-offs
Prepare a project decision deep dive with concrete alternatives, personal ownership, correctness evidence, accepted costs, and a migration rationale.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe Leading a Technical Project
This question evaluates leadership, ownership, collaboration, technical judgment, and project management skills within the Behavioral & Leadership domain of software engineering.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Cloud File Storage
This question tests your ability to design a scalable cloud file storage and collaboration platform, focusing on the architectural separation between metadata and blob storage, chunking, deduplication, and granular access control.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsObject StorageAccess Control - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign File Storage with Metadata, Access Control, and Chunked Uploads
Design drive-style file storage with metadata and blob separation, ACL checks, resumable chunk uploads, atomic publication, and version conflicts.
System DesignOnsite - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDesign Retrieval-Augmented Answers from a Document Vault
Design an enterprise-grade retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) service for confidential document vaults. The question tests multi-tenant access control, precise citation provenance, document versioning/freshness, retrieval quality, and hallucination/injection defenses.
ML System DesignOnsiteRAGAccess ControlInformation Retrieval - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign Spreadsheet Formula Cells
This question evaluates ability to design and implement data structures and algorithms for expression parsing, dependency tracking, incremental evaluation, and cycle detection in an in-memory spreadsheet.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Cloud File Storage Service
This question evaluates competency in designing large-scale distributed file storage and collaboration systems, covering storage and metadata modeling, API design, synchronization and consistency models, resumable large-file handling, versioning, access control, scalability, availability, durability, and security.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Memo Q&A Agent for a Large Law Firm
This problem evaluates your ability to design a RAG-based Q&A system for sensitive legal documents, focusing on multi-stage retrieval, hallucination prevention, and data privacy.
ML System DesignOnsiteRAGLLMSystem Design - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDesign a RAG Q&A Agent over Law Firm Legal Memos
Design an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for querying confidential, complex legal memos. This evaluates domain-specific parsing, hybrid retrieval with fine-grained access control, and grounded generation with strict citation fidelity.
ML System DesignOnsiteRAGVector SearchInformation Retrieval - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a RAG question-answering system
Design an enterprise-grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system capable of answering complex natural language queries over millions of internal documents with high precision, low latency, and verifiable citations.
System DesignOnsiteRAGVector DatabaseInformation Retrieval - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Secure PDF Data Room
Design an enterprise-grade virtual data room (VDR) for secure legal document sharing, focusing on multi-tenant access control, instant permission revocation, dynamic watermarking, and tamper-evident audit logging.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designsecurityauthorization - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a constrained in-memory file system
This question evaluates design and implementation skills for hierarchical in-memory data structures, string parsing and file-name collision handling under constraints, and the ability to reason about time and space complexity.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDesign a production file storage service
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in distributed systems and storage architecture, covering metadata schema design, concurrency control for atomic per-directory limits and renaming, transaction boundaries and idempotency, storage models for file bytes, large-file handling, consistency and failure modes, scalability and partitioning, observability, lifecycle management, and security. It is in the System Design domain and is commonly asked because it reveals how a candidate reasons about architectural trade-offs and practical implementation concerns; it tests both high-level conceptual design and hands-on practical application.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDesign an In-Memory Spreadsheet Engine
Design an in-memory spreadsheet engine that supports cell updates, formula evaluations, cycle detection, and O(1) value lookups via proactive cache propagation.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenGraphTopological SortSystem Design - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an LLM Agent System That Revises a Contract to Comply with Dozens of Rules
Design an LLM agent system that revises a given contract so it complies with several dozen given legal rules. It tests decomposing work across model calls, representing edits so they can be traced and merged, resolving overlapping or conflicting changes, per-rule verification, and cost and latency trade-offs.
ML System DesignOnsite - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an in-memory file system with limits
This question evaluates the ability to design and implement hierarchical in-memory data structures, manage capacity constraints and OS-style duplicate naming, and reason about edge cases and time/space complexity.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerDesign and Evaluate a Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipeline
Design a RAG pipeline with document chunking, retrieval recall evaluation, grounded answers, permission-aware context, and versioned index updates.
ML System DesignOnsite - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerDetermine identical files ignoring metadata
A Harvey AI system design screen on determining whether two files are byte-identical while ignoring metadata, then scaling to deduplication. It covers hashing algorithm choice (SHA-256/BLAKE3 vs MD5/xxHash), multi-stage verification, collision and false-positive mitigation, streaming and parallel hashing, content-defined chunking, and persistent hash-index/service design.
System DesignTechnical Screen - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerEager Spreadsheet Formulas with Constant-Time Reads
Implement eager spreadsheet formulas with constant-time cached reads, transitive dependency updates, cycle rejection, and atomic definition replacement.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerEmbedding Retrieval with Cosine Similarity in a Notebook, and Choosing the Metric
Implement embedding-based document retrieval with cosine similarity in a Python notebook, then explain how cosine similarity relates to dot product and Euclidean distance and how to measure retrieval quality. It tests vectorized top-k search, deterministic ties, index metric choice and evaluation metrics.
Machine LearningOnsite - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerEvaluate Symbol Expressions
Implement an expression evaluator for a dictionary of symbolic definitions with arithmetic operations, resolving dependencies, and detecting cycles and undefined references.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsitedirected-graphtopological-sortexpression-parsing - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerFind Duplicate Files Safely at Scale
Design and implement a robust file duplicate finder that handles filesystem cycles, minimizes disk I/O using multi-stage filtering, and avoids loading entire large files into memory.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenFile SystemsI/O OptimizationHashing - HarveyMediumSoftware EngineerHandle multi-source string matching and tagging
This question evaluates skills in string matching, pattern recognition, overlap handling, text annotation, and counting occurrences across multiple source strings.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - HarveyHardSoftware EngineerHighlight Overlapping Phrases in a Sentence
Tests string search algorithms, interval merging techniques, and clean API design for formatting highlighted spans in text without redundant or malformed tags.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenStringsIntervalsAho-Corasick
Harvey