As a Software Engineer at Lincoln Financial, you will play a critical role in driving the digital transformation of one of the country's largest financial services and insurance institutions. The engineering team is tasked with building, scaling, and maintaining the core applications that support retirement plan services, life insurance, group benefits, and annuities. Your work directly impacts millions of customers who rely on Lincoln Financial to secure their financial futures, requiring a high degree of reliability, security, and performance. The engineering organization is currently undergoing a massive modernization effort, transitioning from legacy on-premise systems to cloud-native architectures. As a Software Engineer, you will not only write code but also actively participate in migrating applications to AWS, optimizing database performance, and refactoring monolithic codebases into scalable microservices. You will work in a highly collaborative, cross-functional environment alongside product managers, business analysts, and system architects to deliver high-quality financial technology solutions. This position offers a unique blend of enterprise-scale challenges and modern technology adoption. Whether you are optimizing Hibernate performance for high-throughput transactions or designing serverless workflows in AWS, your contributions will directly influence the speed, security, and efficiency of Lincoln Financial's digital services.
Phone Screen
reportedInitial 15-to-20-minute call with an internal recruiter to discuss background, salary expectations, and role fit.
What to demonstrate
- Initial 15-to-20-minute call with an internal recruiter to discuss background, salary expectations, and role fit
- Depth in AWS (Amazon Web Services)
How to prepare
- Be able to walk your CV end to end in two minutes, and say why this company specifically.
- Have your salary expectations, notice period and location constraints ready, and ask for the rest of the loop in writing.
Hiring Manager Discussion
reported45-minute discussion with the hiring manager blending behavioral questions and a review of technical experiences.
What to demonstrate
- 45-minute discussion with the hiring manager blending behavioral questions and a review of technical experiences
- Depth in AWS (Amazon Web Services)
How to prepare
- Prepare two projects you led end to end, each with the decision you owned and what it cost.
- Have three questions about the team's roadmap and how success is measured in the first six months.
Panel Interview
reportedFinal stage with senior engineers and technical leads focusing on system design, technical frameworks, and past project execution.
What to demonstrate
- Final stage with senior engineers and technical leads focusing on system design, technical frameworks, and past project execution
- Depth in AWS (Amazon Web Services)
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: How do you handle state management and session timeouts when working with frontend frameworks like JSF or Primefaces?
- Answer aloud and timed: Walk me through an application migration project you led or contributed to. How did you transition services to AWS?
PracHub editorial advice for the preparation topics above.
Master your resume details
Interviewers frequently ask candidates to walk through their past projects from beginning to end. Be ready to explain every technology, architecture, and decision listed on your resume in exhaustive detail.
Brush up on legacy modernization
Be prepared to discuss how you would approach migrating legacy systems (like on-premise Java applications) to the cloud. Showing respect for legacy systems while advocating for modern solutions is a great way to stand out.
Quoting amortised or average cost as if it were a worst-case guarantee
Appending to a dynamic array is amortised O(1), but the append that triggers a resize copies every element, and hash lookup is constant only while the hash spreads the actual keys. Say which guarantee you are offering when the caller cares about the latency of one call rather than the total over many.
Choose a category, try a prompt, then open its approach, worked solution or follow-up when you need it.
Describe your experience with multi-threading. How do you ensure thread safety in a high-concurrency Java appl
Describe your experience with multi-threading. How do you ensure thread safety in a high-concurrency Java application?
Approach
- Say what the runtime actually does before reasoning about the code.
- Name what is shared across threads and what owns each piece of state.
- Identify the window where an invariant is briefly untrue.
- Distinguish a value from a reference to it, and say which one you handed out.
Follow-up
- What happens if two callers reach this at the same time?
- Where could this allocate more than you expect?
Canonicalise a request body into a stable idempotency fingerprint
idempotency_key.request_fingerprint is a SHA-256 over the method, path and canonicalised body, and a retry whose fingerprint differs must be rejected with 422 rather than served the stored response. Write the canonicaliser. Bodies are JSON up to 256 KB nested at most 32 levels; clients vary key order, whitespace and unicode escaping, and some send 64-bit ids as JSON numbers. Produce a deterministic byte string such that semantically identical bodies match and any semantic difference does not. State your complexity and name two normalisations you refuse to perform.
Approach
- Parse once into a tree, then re-serialise under fixed rules: object keys sorted, array order preserved, one escaping convention, no insignificant whitespace. Parsing is O(n) and sorting keys is O(k log k) per object, so O(n log n) overall with O(depth) stack, and the 32-level cap is enforced during parsing because hostile nesting is how a canonicaliser becomes a stack overflow.
- Sort keys by their UTF-8 bytes and say why the obvious implementation is wrong in some runtimes: a default string comparison that orders by UTF-16 code units places surrogate pairs, meaning code points from U+10000 up, below U+E000 to U+FFFF, which is not UTF-8 byte order, so two services written in different languages disagree on the same document.
- Do not re-encode numbers through a double. IEEE-754 binary64 represents integers exactly only up to 2^53, so normalising a 19-digit id through a float changes it, and 1 against 1.0 cannot be reconciled without deciding whether they are the same value. Preserve the literal token, and require ids as strings at the API boundary if you want them comparable.
- Reject duplicate keys rather than picking one. JSON permits them and parsers disagree, most keeping the last, so any choice you make ties the fingerprint to a parser detail that the code handling the request does not necessarily share.
Follow-up
- A client sends the same logical request with an extra field your API ignores. Same key, different fingerprint, so you return 422. Is that the right answer?
- Where does the fingerprint get computed relative to request decompression and the body-size limit?
Collapse a redelivered event batch into per-aggregate high-water marks
You drain a batch of up to 5,000,000 events, each (aggregate_id BIGINT, aggregate_version INT, event_type, payload). The log guarantees order within one aggregate only; the batch merges 64 partitions, and a relay failover has redelivered a range, so an older version for an aggregate can appear after a newer one. Given a map of last_applied_version per aggregate, produce the events worth applying, at most one per (aggregate_id, version), plus the count discarded. Target O(n) time. State the memory for 2,000,000 distinct aggregates and what you do when it does not fit.
Approach
- One pass, one hash map from aggregate_id to the highest version kept, and a discard counter. An event whose version is at or below last_applied_version for its aggregate is dropped without further work, which is the whole reason the event carries its version rather than a delta. O(n) expected time, O(d) space in distinct aggregates.
- Keep the maximum, never the last occurrence. The redelivered range means the final appearance of an aggregate in the batch can be an older version than one seen earlier in the same batch, so last-wins applies stale state over newer state and the projection regresses with no error anywhere.
- Cost the memory instead of calling it large: an 8-byte key plus a 4-byte version is 12 bytes of payload, and an open-addressed table held at a 0.7 load factor costs roughly 17 bytes per entry before per-slot metadata, so 2,000,000 aggregates is tens of megabytes in a native layout and several times that in a runtime that boxes both key and value.
- If the distinct set exceeds memory, partition on hash(aggregate_id) mod P and reduce each partition independently. Every event for one aggregate hashes to the same partition, so the per-partition result is exact and the merge is concatenation rather than a second reduction.
Follow-up
- The payload is a patch rather than a snapshot, so applying only the highest version loses the intermediate changes. What changes in your reduction?
- How do you detect that version 7 arrived while version 6 was never delivered, and what should the consumer do about the gap?
Find version gaps and relay lag with window functions
outbox_event holds event_id, aggregate_type, aggregate_id, aggregate_version, event_type, payload, status ('pending','published','dead'), attempts, created_at, published_at. A projection is missing rows and you must decide whether the relay skipped events or the consumer dropped them. Write three queries over the last seven days: one listing every aggregate_id whose published aggregate_version sequence has a hole, one giving per-day counts with a running total, and one returning the newest published event per aggregate. For each, say where the window function is evaluated relative to WHERE and LIMIT. PostgreSQL 16.
Approach
- Gaps: compute lead(aggregate_version) OVER (PARTITION BY aggregate_id ORDER BY aggregate_version) in a subquery, then filter next_version <> aggregate_version + 1 in the outer query. Window functions are evaluated after WHERE, GROUP BY and HAVING and before the outer ORDER BY and LIMIT, so the predicate cannot sit in the same WHERE clause and PostgreSQL 16 has no QUALIFY.
- Say what the seven-day filter does to the answer: it truncates every partition, so the first row per aggregate has no predecessor inside the window and a hole spanning the boundary is invisible. Widen the window, or join to resource.version as the authority for the true maximum.
- Running total: SELECT date_trunc('day', created_at) AS d, count() AS n, sum(count()) OVER (ORDER BY date_trunc('day', created_at) ROWS UNBOUNDED PRECEDING). An aggregate inside a window call is legal because grouping runs before windowing. The grouping key is unique per row here so ROWS and RANGE agree, but write the frame anyway — over ungrouped rows with tied timestamps the default RANGE frame pulls in every peer row and the total jumps.
- Newest per aggregate: DISTINCT ON (aggregate_id) ... ORDER BY aggregate_id, aggregate_version DESC is the cheap PostgreSQL-only form when an index matches that order; row_number() OVER (PARTITION BY aggregate_id ORDER BY aggregate_version DESC) = 1 is the portable form and needs a subquery for the same evaluation-order reason as the gap query.
Follow-up
- Relay failover redelivers events. Does a duplicate break the gap query, and how would you detect one from this table alone?
- Turn the gap check into a continuous monitor rather than a query someone runs after an incident. What does it watch?
Denormalise tenant onto revisions and backfill it live
resource_revision (revision_id, resource_id, version, actor_user_id, change_kind, patch, request_id, created_at) has 400M rows and no tenant column; tenant_id lives only on resource. Two reads need it: a tenant-scoped audit feed ordered by created_at DESC, and an offboarding purge. Both join back to resource today. Justify adding tenant_id to resource_revision against those two reads, name the anomaly the copy introduces and the constraint that prevents it, then give the ordered migration for a live table taking 1.2k writes/second — the lock each step takes, how the backfill is batched, and where each step stops being reversible. PostgreSQL 16.
Approach
- Justify from the access path rather than from taste. Without the column, the audit feed either scans resource_revision by created_at and discards other tenants' rows, or resolves the tenant's resource_ids first and probes with them — both proportional to the tenant's whole history rather than to one page. With (tenant_id, created_at DESC, revision_id DESC) it is a seek that stops at 50 rows, and the purge becomes a ranged delete instead of a join.
- Name the cost exactly: a second copy of a fact can disagree with the first. Make the disagreement unwritable rather than documented — add UNIQUE (resource_id, tenant_id) on resource so it can serve as a foreign-key target, then FOREIGN KEY (resource_id, tenant_id) REFERENCES resource (resource_id, tenant_id) on the revision table. A revision can then only ever carry its parent's tenant.
- Step one, expand: ALTER TABLE resource_revision ADD COLUMN tenant_id BIGINT NULL, with no default, so it is a catalogue change and no rewrite. It still needs ACCESS EXCLUSIVE for an instant, and that instant queues behind the longest open transaction on the table while every later query queues behind it — set lock_timeout to 2s and retry rather than wait.
- Step two, dual-write: deploy the writer that populates tenant_id on every new revision while reads still use the join. Reversible by redeploying the previous build, because nothing reads the column yet.
Follow-up
- The backfill is half finished and a rollback is required. What state is the table in, and what does the previous build do with a half-populated column?
- How do you verify the backfill actually finished, given rows are still being inserted while it runs?
How do you diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks or lazy loading issues when using Hibernate and JPA?
How do you diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks or lazy loading issues when using Hibernate and JPA?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
Can you explain the differences between optimistic and pessimistic locking in an enterprise database applicati
Can you explain the differences between optimistic and pessimistic locking in an enterprise database application?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
What are the core principles of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), and how do you apply them to write maintain
What are the core principles of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), and how do you apply them to write maintainable code?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
Walk me through an application migration project you led or contributed to. How did you transition services to
Walk me through an application migration project you led or contributed to. How did you transition services to AWS?
Approach
- Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
- Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
- Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
- State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.
Follow-up
- What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
- How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?
What AWS services would you use to design a highly available, fault-tolerant batch processing system?
What AWS services would you use to design a highly available, fault-tolerant batch processing system?
Approach
- Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
- Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
- Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
- State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.
Follow-up
- What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
- How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?
How do you manage database connections and pool sizing in a cloud environment to prevent resource exhaustion?
How do you manage database connections and pool sizing in a cloud environment to prevent resource exhaustion?
Approach
- Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
- Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
- Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
- State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.
Follow-up
- What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
- How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?
Explain how you would decouple a monolithic system into microservices using event-driven architecture.
Explain how you would decouple a monolithic system into microservices using event-driven architecture.
Approach
- Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
- Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
- Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
- State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.
Follow-up
- What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
- How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?
What strategies do you employ to secure sensitive financial data both in transit and at rest within a cloud en
What strategies do you employ to secure sensitive financial data both in transit and at rest within a cloud environment?
Approach
- Say who the caller is and what they do when the call fails halfway.
- Define the identity of a request so a retry cannot double-apply it.
- Separate accepted, pending, failed and confirmed; they are different facts.
- Design the error taxonomy before the success shape; callers branch on it.
Follow-up
- What happens if the caller retries after a timeout?
- How does a client discover it is on an old version of this contract?
One log partition stops advancing while the others drain
Search results for a subset of tenants are hours stale; the rest are current. The projection consumer reports lag of zero on 15 of 16 partitions and 400,000 on one. Its error rate is flat and its CPU is idle. outbox_event has no pending rows older than a second, so the relay has published everything it holds. Identify the mechanism, give the ordered checks, and state what you do in the first ten minutes versus what you change permanently.
Approach
- Read the lag distribution first. A slow consumer lags everywhere; zero on fifteen partitions and 400,000 on one is not throughput. Idle CPU on the stuck partition means the consumer is not advancing its offset at all, which points at one message it cannot get past rather than at a rate problem.
- Exonerate the producer before touching the consumer. No pending outbox rows older than a second means the relay published, so the event exists in the log. This separates never sent from sent and never applied, which are different code paths and usually different owners.
- Read the message at the stuck offset and the handler's log lines for its event_id. A flat error rate with no progress has two explanations and you must distinguish them: the handler is throwing and the retry loop is swallowing it, or the handler is blocking on something and never returning. Idle CPU with no error lines favours the second.
- Mitigate before diagnosing further. Move the offending event to a dead-letter store and commit the offset past it. Adding consumers does nothing here, because a partition is consumed by exactly one member of the group, and the blast radius is every aggregate hashed to that partition, not only the aggregate that produced the bad event.
Follow-up
- The dead-lettered event carried aggregate_version 7 and the projection had applied 6. What must the replay do differently if 8 and 9 landed in the meantime?
- How do you show staleness to the user while the partition is behind, given the API already returns the projection's watermark?
Built from the rounds and topics Lincoln Financial candidates report.
Prepare, practise & reflect
One practical outcome each day. Spend longer where you need it.
0 / 7 done01Map the Lincoln Financial loop
- Write out the reported sequence: Phone Screen, Hiring Manager Discussion, Panel Interview.
- For each round, write one sentence on what it is judging, from the description above, and mark the one you are least ready for.
Deliverable: A one-page map of the 3 reported rounds, with the weakest marked.
02Work AWS (Amazon Web Services)
- Spend the session on AWS (Amazon Web Services), which Lincoln Financial candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in AWS (Amazon Web Services) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in AWS (Amazon Web Services).
03Work Hibernate
- Spend the session on Hibernate, which Lincoln Financial candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Hibernate and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Hibernate.
04Work JPA (Java Persistence API)
- Spend the session on JPA (Java Persistence API), which Lincoln Financial candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in JPA (Java Persistence API) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in JPA (Java Persistence API).
05Answer out loud: Technical & Framework Deep Dives
- Answer aloud, timed: How do you diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks or lazy loading issues when using Hibernate and JPA?
- Answer aloud, timed: Can you explain the differences between optimistic and pessimistic locking in an enterprise database application?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Technical & Framework Deep Dives question(s), under time.
06Answer out loud: Cloud & System Architecture
- Answer aloud, timed: Walk me through an application migration project you led or contributed to. How did you transition services to AWS?
- Answer aloud, timed: What AWS services would you use to design a highly available, fault-tolerant batch processing system?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Cloud & System Architecture question(s), under time.
07Answer out loud: Behavioral & Project History
- Answer aloud, timed: Walk me through a complex software project you worked on from beginning to end, highlighting your specific contributions and the business value delivered.
- Answer aloud, timed: Tell me about a time when you had to gather requirements from non-technical business stakeholders. How did you translate those into a technical design?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Behavioral & Project History question(s), under time.
Expand any day for tasks and deliverables. Your progress is saved on this device.
Behavioural rounds judge the decision you made and what it cost.
How do you handle state management and session timeouts when working with frontend frameworks like JSF or Prim
How do you handle state management and session timeouts when working with frontend frameworks like JSF or Primefaces?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
Walk me through a complex software project you worked on from beginning to end, highlighting your specific con
Walk me through a complex software project you worked on from beginning to end, highlighting your specific contributions and the business value delivered.
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
Tell me about a time when you had to gather requirements from non-technical business stakeholders. How did you
Tell me about a time when you had to gather requirements from non-technical business stakeholders. How did you translate those into a technical design?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
Describe a situation where you had a disagreement with a technical lead or manager regarding an architectural
Describe a situation where you had a disagreement with a technical lead or manager regarding an architectural decision. How did you resolve it?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
How do you prioritize your tasks when working on multiple high-priority projects with tight deadlines?
How do you prioritize your tasks when working on multiple high-priority projects with tight deadlines?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
Share an example of a time when you identified a major bug or performance issue in production. What steps did
Share an example of a time when you identified a major bug or performance issue in production. What steps did you take to mitigate and permanently fix the issue?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
- 01
How do you handle state management and session timeouts when working with frontend frameworks like JSF or Primefaces?
- 02
Walk me through a complex software project you worked on from beginning to end, highlighting your specific contributions and the business value delivered.
- 03
Tell me about a time when you had to gather requirements from non-technical business stakeholders. How did you translate those into a technical design?
- 04
Describe a situation where you had a disagreement with a technical lead or manager regarding an architectural decision. How did you resolve it?
Is there a live coding or LeetCode-style test in the interview process?
Typically, no. Lincoln Financial focuses much more on your past project experiences, architectural understanding, and practical knowledge of frameworks rather than abstract algorithmic puzzles. Be prepared to talk through your resume in detail.
Lincoln Financial Software Engineer candidate reports ↗How long does the entire hiring process usually take?
The process can range from two weeks to two months. It often depends on the urgency of the hiring team and the specific role level. Keeping in touch with your recruiter is key to navigating the timeline.
Lincoln Financial Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What is the hybrid or remote work policy for Software Engineers?
Lincoln Financial generally operates on a hybrid model, requiring some days in the office depending on the location (such as Radnor, PA or Greensboro, NC) and the specific team's needs. This should be clarified during your initial recruiter screen.
Lincoln Financial Software Engineer candidate reports ↗How heavily is AWS knowledge weighted during the interview?
Very heavily, especially for senior roles. Because of the ongoing modernization efforts, having a strong grasp of AWS services, cloud security, and migration strategies is highly valued and frequently tested.
Lincoln Financial Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What is the culture like within the engineering teams?
The culture is collaborative, structured, and professional, characteristic of a major financial institution. Teams place a high value on compliance, security, and steady, reliable software delivery.
Lincoln Financial Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What topics does Lincoln Financial test in interviews?
Lincoln Financial interviews most often cover Stakeholder Management, Behavioral Interviewing, Analytical Thinking, Python, and Requirement Gathering. The exact emphasis depends on the specific role you apply for.
Lincoln Financial Software Engineer candidate reports ↗Sources & methodology 3 sources ↗
No official company page is cited. Rounds and questions come from candidate reports and PracHub editorial material; each source shows the date it was read.
- 01Lincoln Financial Software Engineer candidate reports ↗
Company-reported rounds, questions and FAQ.
Candidate reports · Accessed 2026-09-22 - 02PracHub Software Engineer practice ↗
PracHub practice material, not company-reported.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22 - 03PracHub preparation framework ↗
PracHub preparation guidance.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22