40 Software Engineer Interview Questions (2025) + Practice with AI

Master the STAR Method

For behavioral questions, use Situation, Task, Action, Result. Focus 50% on the technical actions you took, include code examples and architecture decisions, quantify performance improvements, and explain trade-offs you considered.

Essential Technical Frameworks

SOLID Principles: Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion

Big O Notation: Master time and space complexity analysis (O(1), O(log n), O(n), O(n log n), O(n²))

CAP Theorem: Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance trade-offs in distributed systems

Design Patterns: Singleton, Factory, Observer, Strategy, Decorator

Problem-Solving Approach: Clarify → Examples → Brute Force → Optimize → Code → Test

Interview Process Timeline

Phone Screen (45-60 min): 1-2 coding problems, basic data structures and algorithms

Technical Round 1 (45-60 min): Data structures, algorithm optimization, edge cases

Technical Round 2 (45-60 min): System design or advanced coding problem

Technical Round 3 (45-60 min): Domain-specific questions, architecture discussions

Behavioral Round (30-45 min): Team collaboration, conflict resolution, project ownership

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Jumping to code without clarifying requirements and edge cases

Why Practice Software Engineer Interviews with Revarta

Benefit:Real-World Coding

Practice with actual coding challenges and algorithmic problems faced in tech interviews

Benefit:Identify your gaps

Personalized questions based on your technical expertise and coding skills let you immediately discover areas you need to improve on

Benefit:Master problem-solving

Strengthen your responses by practicing areas you're weak in

Benefit:Bite sized practice

Only have 5 minutes? Practice a quick coding problem or system design question

Master Your Software Engineering Interview

Get personalized feedback on your coding skills, system design knowledge, and problem-solving capabilities

Software Engineer Interview Overview

Don't Bomb Your Software Engineer Interview

Common Software Engineer Interview Questions

Implement a function to reverse a linked list. What's the time and space complexity?

Find the longest substring without repeating characters in a given string.

Design a data structure that supports insert, delete, and getRandom operations in O(1) time.

Given a binary tree, write a function to determine if it's a valid binary search tree.

Implement an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache with O(1) get and put operations.

Find the median of two sorted arrays in O(log(min(m,n))) time.

Implement a trie (prefix tree) and explain its use cases.

Given an array of intervals, merge all overlapping intervals.

Design an algorithm to serialize and deserialize a binary tree.

Find the kth largest element in an unsorted array.

Implement a function to detect a cycle in a linked list.

Given a string containing digits, return all possible letter combinations that the number could represent (phone keypad).

Design a URL shortening service like bit.ly. How would you handle high traffic?

How would you design a distributed cache system?

Design a scalable notification system that can handle push notifications, emails, and SMS.

Explain how you would design the backend for a real-time chat application like WhatsApp.

Design a rate limiter for an API that can handle distributed systems.

How would you design a system to handle file uploads and processing at scale?

Design a search autocomplete system like Google's search suggestions.

Explain how you would design a logging and monitoring system for microservices.

Design a parking lot management system with real-time availability tracking.

How would you design a video streaming service like Netflix?

Explain the SOLID principles and give examples of how you've applied them.

What's your approach to writing unit tests? How do you decide what to test?

How do you handle database migrations in a production environment with zero downtime?

Explain your Git workflow and how you handle merge conflicts in a team.

What strategies do you use to ensure code quality in a fast-paced development environment?

How would you refactor a monolithic application into microservices?

Explain the CI/CD pipeline you would set up for a new project.

How do you approach technical debt? When do you address it vs when do you defer it?

Your API is responding slowly. Walk me through how you would diagnose and fix the issue.

How would you optimize a SQL query that's taking too long to execute?

Explain how garbage collection works and how you would tune it for a high-traffic application.

How would you reduce the memory footprint of an application that's consuming too much RAM?

What techniques would you use to improve frontend performance and reduce page load time?

How do you protect an API from common security vulnerabilities?

Explain how you would implement secure password storage and authentication.

How would you secure sensitive data in a database and during transmission?

Tell me about a time you had to debug a complex production issue under pressure.

Describe a situation where you disagreed with a technical decision. How did you handle it?

How do you stay current with new technologies and programming languages?

Tell me about a time you had to make a trade-off between perfect code and shipping quickly.

Describe your most challenging technical project. What made it difficult and how did you overcome obstacles?

How do you approach learning a new codebase or technology stack?

[Google] Implement an algorithm to find all anagrams of a word in a large dictionary. How would you optimize for Google-scale data?

[Google] Design Google's infrastructure for serving search results with millisecond latency.

[Meta] How would you design the News Feed ranking algorithm for Facebook?

[Meta] Implement a function to detect if a social network graph has any cycles.

[Amazon] Design the recommendation engine for Amazon's product suggestions.

[Amazon] Write code to find the lowest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree.

How to Prepare for Your Software Engineer Interview

Master the STAR Method

Essential Technical Frameworks

Interview Process Timeline

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Key Software Engineer Interview Topics

Data Structures & Algorithms

System Design

Software Development

Revarta helps you ace your interviews

Why Practice Software Engineer Interviews with Revarta

Benefit:Real-World Coding

Benefit:Identify your gaps

Benefit:Master problem-solving

Benefit:Bite sized practice

How we increase your success rate

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Resources for Software Engineer Interviews

STAR Method Interview Guide - Complete Framework with 20+ Examples

Tell Me About Your Greatest Accomplishment - Why 70% Undersell Themselves (And How to Get It Right)

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