General Motors Software Engineer Interview Experience — Open-Ended System Design That Ran Fifteen Minutes Over

General Motors·Software Engineer·Sep 2026
Onsitemedium

The interview was scheduled for 45 minutes.

The interviewer gave me a question that was roughly: there is an application that has to call three to five dependency services, and how do you guarantee a specific target for a specific service, for example access latency under 10 seconds and availability above 99%.

It didn't feel like a normal design round. It felt like a very open-ended discussion about solving and optimizing a problem. After we confirmed the requirements above and started breaking things down step by step, the interviewer kept jumping from a topic I hadn't finished talking about straight to another topic we hadn't discussed, or to a new requirement, so I spent a lot of the time just confirming the newly added requirements.

In the end it went 15 minutes over and dragged out to a full hour, and the feedback I got was that my result was incorrect.

The platform was Codility.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

Practice the questions from this interview

Discussion

Sign in to join the discussion. The author is notified of every comment.

Loading comments…

Interview at a glance

Company
General Motors
Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Onsite
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Sep 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

Real General Motors interview experiences

First-hand reports from General Motors candidates — the rounds, the questions they were asked, and how it went.

All 6 General Motors interview experiences