Software Engineer Interview Questions 💻 🚀

👋 Hi, I'm Michael! I put together this interview guide with questions and resources I encountered over the course of 50+ technical interviews at companies anywhere from startups to FAANG to hedge funds.

It's not meant to be an exhaustive list, but it's a great place to start if you're studying for interviews! :)

📢 Big shoutout to everyone who contributed questions & resources!! 📢

🙏 Want to add questions/resources? Make a PR! 🙏

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Concept Review 🔄

Not quite ready to jump into problem solving? Check out this list of crash course/review content to brush up on concepts before working on the problems

Interview Questions 🏔

Here's the list you've been looking for! I've categorized the questions by their overarching category/concept, with notes on tips and what company asked me (or one of the contributors) the question.

Important Note: The companies that asked these questions are self-reported from repo contributors and per my memory. Companies are constantly changing their interview bank, so don't read too much into it!

10 Must-Know Questions

💡 Note: I encountered these questions multiple times over the course of my interviews. Make sure you know these well since many future problems will build off of your knowledge of these concepts! Feel free to start with these questions or come back at the end to test your knowledge :)

Arrays

Strings

Linked Lists

Trees and Traversals

Dynamic Programming

💡Note: DP questions aren't commonly tested for internship & new-grad roles at FAANG companies, but it doesn't hurt to get a good grasp of the basics!

Other Interview Prep

Time & Space Complexity and Big-O Notation

💡 Note: Big-O questions are asked in just about every technical interview (especially in FAANG), so be sure that you are familiar and comfortable with time and space complexity questions!

System Design Interview Prep

💡Note: System design questions are an important part of the technical interview that allow you to showcase that you are more than just a code monkey. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture – who is your customer, what are your constraints, how would you manage security/traffic? Show that you're able to design an effective program – and use common sense.

Operating Systems & Concurrency

💡 Note: Threading/OS questions are pretty uncommon for most SWE interviews – I was only asked OS questions when interviewing for quantitative finance firms and some system-specific roles (performance engineering) at FAANG companies!

Behavioral Interview Prep

People often overlook behavioral questions – and shockingly, I've heard of friends that have aced the coding parts of interviews only to struggle and ultimately get rejected because of the behavioral interview. Here's my favorite blog post on how to approach behavioral interviews!