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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
Companies
11
Topics
8
Languages

Showing 2941–2970 of 5874 results

  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design an in-memory key-value store using maps

    This question evaluates skills in in-memory data modeling, concurrent access control, time-complexity reasoning for expected O(1) operations, and storage engine considerations such as durability, compaction, and TTL when restricting indexing to map/dictionary primitives.

    System DesignOnsite
  • LinkedInHardSoftware Engineer
    Design distributed parallel job processing

    This question evaluates understanding of distributed systems architecture, parallel job scheduling, fault tolerance, coordination and concurrency control, API and data model design, idempotency, observability, and capacity planning for multi-tenant, heterogeneous workloads.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Design scalable job scheduler and query dashboard

    This question evaluates a candidate's system design skills in building a scalable, fault-tolerant job scheduling system and efficient near-real-time time-window querying, focusing on distributed scheduling, storage and indexing strategies, partitioning, and reliability guarantees, and is commonly asked to probe trade-offs among scalability, latency, availability, and consistency. Belonging to the System Design domain, it examines both high-level architectural thinking and practical application-level considerations such as data modeling, query/index design, operational concerns like hot partitions, and horizontal scaling.

    System DesignOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Discuss Projects and Tradeoffs

    English summary: This question evaluates competency in technical ownership, system architecture articulation, trade-off analysis, measurable outcome reporting, and cross-team leadership within software engineering projects.

    Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Explain a Difficult Technical Decision and Its Implementation

    Discuss a project's technical trade-off through concrete mechanisms, failure cases, validation evidence, and the strengths of rejected alternatives.

    Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Explain a Project with a Diagram and Deep Dive into Your Design

    Communicate a project through a simple data-flow diagram, then explain design choices, implementation ownership, failure behavior, and validation.

    Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsite
  • LinkedInHardSoftware Engineer
    Explain a Technical Project with an Architecture Diagram

    This question evaluates your ability to clearly explain a complex software architecture, articulate your personal technical ownership, justify design trade-offs, and quantify business and operational impact.

    Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screenbehavioralsystem architecturetechnical leadership
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Explain a past project and critique a prior team

    This question evaluates communication of technical ownership, system architecture reasoning, and leadership competencies such as collaboration, conflict resolution, and influencing change within a Software Engineer role.

    Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Explain database transactions and ACID

    This question evaluates a candidate's understanding of database transactions including ACID properties, isolation levels (read uncommitted, read committed, repeatable read, serializable), common anomalies (dirty reads, non-repeatable reads, phantom reads), MVCC, and commit/rollback semantics, testing competency in transactional correctness and concurrency control. Commonly asked in System Design and database contexts because it probes reasoning about data integrity, visibility, and durability under concurrent workloads, and it tests both conceptual understanding of transactional guarantees and practical application of isolation behavior in relational database systems.

    System DesignTechnical Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Explain the Design of a Recent Feature

    Tests your ability to communicate software design clearly by breaking down a production feature into its architecture, trade-offs, individual ownership, and verification strategy.

    Software Engineering FundamentalsOnsiteSystem DesignTechnical CommunicationArchitecture
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Explain your most impactful project clearly

    This question evaluates technical communication, system design, architectural reasoning and leadership competencies by requiring a clear description of system components, data flow, individual responsibilities, trade-offs, and measurable impact.

    Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Fewest-Edge Distance Between Two Nodes in a Directed Acyclic Graph

    Given a directed acyclic graph and two nodes, return the fewest edges on a directed path from the source to the target, 0 when they are the same node, or -1 when the target cannot be reached. Asked as a follow-up to topological ordering, it tests traversal of dependency graphs.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find a Target's Index in a Rotated Sorted Array of Distinct Integers

    Find the index of a target value in an array of distinct integers that was sorted ascending and then rotated at an unknown pivot, returning -1 when it is absent. Tests adapting search to a partially ordered array in logarithmic time and handling unrotated and single-element inputs.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOther
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find dictionary words matching a phone digit string

    This problem tests your ability to map phone keypad digits to characters and efficiently filter a provided dictionary to find words that match a specific digit sequence.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteStringHash TableTrie
  • LinkedInEasySoftware Engineer
    Find dictionary words that match a phone keypad digit sequence

    Coding problem: given a list of known words and a digit string typed on a standard phone keypad, return every known word whose letters map to exactly that digit sequence, in sorted order. It tests string encoding, choosing a lookup structure for the dictionary, and analyzing time complexity.

    Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find lowest common ancestor

    This question evaluates understanding of binary tree structure, lowest common ancestor concepts, and competency in algorithmic reasoning and tree traversal within the Coding & Algorithms category.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find the K Closest Values in a Sorted Array

    This problem tests binary search and window optimization to find the k nearest elements to a target in a sorted integer array.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteBinary SearchTwo PointersArrays
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find the K Values Closest to a Target in a Binary Search Tree

    Given a binary search tree described by its preorder traversal, a real-valued target and an integer k, return the k node values closest to the target in ascending order, breaking distance ties toward the smaller value. Tests binary search tree traversal, reasoning over ordered data and precise tie handling.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find the Maximum Depth of a Binary Tree

    Find binary-tree depth from a portable child-index representation, including empty trees and highly unbalanced root-to-leaf paths.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find the Node Where Two Singly Linked Lists Merge

    Two singly linked lists stored in one successor array may merge at some node and share every node after it. Given both heads, return the first shared node, or -1 if the lists never meet. It tests linked-list traversal and careful handling of cases such as one list starting inside the other.

    Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Find the k-th largest element in an array

    This question evaluates proficiency with selection algorithms, array manipulation, and analysis of time and space complexity, reflecting competency in order-statistics and basic data structures.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Generate All Distinct Permutations of a List with Duplicate Values

    Given a list of up to eight integers that may contain duplicates, return every distinct permutation exactly once, sorted in lexicographic order. It tests systematic enumeration, avoiding duplicate results caused by equal values, and producing a deterministic output order.

    Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen
  • LinkedInEasySoftware Engineer
    Handle Issues and Onboard Teammates

    This question evaluates leadership, cross-functional communication, incident management, and knowledge-transfer competencies by probing how a candidate resolves stakeholder disagreements and explains team-owned systems.

    Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    How do you win project buy-in?

    This question evaluates leadership, stakeholder management, and team resiliency competencies by probing experience in securing project buy-in and in preventing single-point-of-failure through knowledge sharing, documentation, and ownership distribution.

    Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Implement Fast Power with Negative Exponents

    This problem tests your ability to implement the exponentiation by squaring algorithm while correctly handling edge cases like negative exponents and integer overflow.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsiteAlgorithmsMathBit Manipulation
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Implement an LRU cache with follow-ups

    This question evaluates understanding of core data structures and algorithms for designing an efficient LRU cache as well as knowledge of concurrency and synchronization for thread-safe access.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Implement map and render to DOM

    This question evaluates a candidate's skills in vanilla JavaScript utility implementation and DOM rendering, covering array and plain-object iteration semantics, higher-order functions, input validation, error handling, and safe text rendering for browser environments.

    Software Engineering FundamentalsHR Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Introduce yourself and discuss challenges

    This question evaluates communication, leadership, self-awareness, and the ability to concisely articulate technical impact, trade-offs, and measurable outcomes.

    Behavioral & LeadershipHR Screen
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Largest Sum of a Non-Empty Contiguous Subarray

    Given an integer array, return the largest sum of any non-empty contiguous subarray, including arrays in which every number is negative. This classic phone-screen problem tests efficient array processing and careful handling of edge cases such as all-negative input.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
  • LinkedInMediumSoftware Engineer
    Lexicographically Smallest Topological Order of a Dependency Graph

    Given n labeled nodes and directed precedence edges, return an ordering that respects every edge, choosing the lexicographically smallest valid ordering, or an empty list when a cycle makes ordering impossible. It tests topological sorting, cycle detection and deterministic tie-breaking.

    Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite