Software Engineering Fundamentals Interview Questions
Practice the exact questions companies are asking right now.
Explain KV cache in Transformer inference
Question In Transformer-based language model inference, what is a key-value (KV) cache? Explain: - What gets cached (tensors, shapes at a high level) ...
Explain container image flow in CI/CD
Scenario Walk through what happens in a typical CI/CD pipeline that builds and deploys a containerized service. Questions 1. During CI, how is a conta...
Explain virtual machines and concurrency basics
Topics Answer at a senior-engineer depth. Use diagrams or step-by-step reasoning as needed. 1) Virtual machines (VMs) - What is a VM and what problem ...
Fix race condition in concurrent deposit
Concurrent bank account debugging (thread safety) You are given a simple BankAccount object that is used concurrently from multiple threads. Two depos...
Design a social network with snapshots
You are asked to design and implement an in-memory SocialNetwork class that supports users following each other and creating snapshots of the follow g...
Design CSV upload endpoint with GPT classification
You are building a backend service that needs to process two CSV files and then call an external GPT-like API for classification. Requirements 1. HTTP...
Design a multithreaded event logger
Design a multithreaded in-memory event logger for a server application. Requirements: - Many worker threads running in the process need to log events ...
Design an object-oriented poker game
Design the object-oriented architecture for a command-line poker game. Requirements (clarify and state assumptions) Assume a standard 52-card deck (no...
Optimize a core kernel for throughput
You are given a mocked “core kernel” function (similar in spirit to a GPU kernel / tight compute loop) that is functionally correct but slow. Task - O...
Design article voting and flip-tracking system
Design an object-oriented "Article System" that supports voting and query operations. You need to design the data model and core APIs (including metho...
Answer Spring Boot and Thymeleaf engineering questions
Spring Boot + Thymeleaf (Engineering Questions) Answer the following interview questions with concrete debugging steps, best practices, and design cho...
Explain process vs thread and memory-sharing risks
You are asked about OS concurrency fundamentals. Prompt 1. What is the difference between a process and a thread? 2. Do processes and threads share me...
Find valid range of q for outcome probabilities
You have a 3-outcome experiment with mutually exclusive outcomes: - Outcome 1 occurs with probability \(q\) - Outcome 2 occurs with probability \(q^2\...
Design a thread-safe key-value store
You are working on infrastructure for an AI platform. Inside a single process, many worker threads need to share a simple in-memory key–value store; a...
Design poker-like hand comparison with custom ranking
Problem Design an object-oriented solution to compare two players’ hands in a card game similar to poker. You are given two hands (each a fixed number...
Debug distributed-system performance problems
You are asked: “If a distributed system has a performance problem (latency/throughput regression), how would you approach it?” Describe a practical, s...
Explain ACID and isolation levels
Explain what a database transaction is, define the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability), and describe common transaction is...
Describe common RTL lint warnings and errors
You are writing RTL (e.g., Verilog/SystemVerilog) and run a lint tool on your code. The tool reports items such as: - "Treat as black box" - Combinati...
Explain what torch.distributed.barrier does
Question In PyTorch distributed training, what does torch.distributed.barrier() do? Follow-ups - Give an example of when you would use it. - What are ...
Explain debugging methodology for production issues
In a technical interview, you are asked: > What is your methodology when debugging or when something goes wrong? Describe a systematic approach you wo...