A Software Engineer at Relativity plays a critical role in developing and scaling the company's core platform, which is trusted by thousands of organizations globally to manage massive volumes of unstructured data. Whether you are working on the flagship e-discovery SaaS platform, RelativityOne, or building foundational systems infrastructure, your work directly impacts how legal, corporate, and government entities search, analyze, and secure highly sensitive information. Engineers here solve complex problems related to distributed systems, high-throughput data processing, real-time search indexing, and large-scale relational databases. At Relativity, the engineering culture is built on collaboration, technical rigor, and a strong commitment to operational excellence. As a Software Engineer, you will not just write code; you will take ownership of end-to-end feature delivery, from architectural design and database modeling to automated testing and deployment. The engineering team values clean, maintainable code written with solid object-oriented principles, ensuring that the platform remains highly performant, secure, and extensible under extreme scale. This role offers a unique opportunity to work on complex, multi-layered architectures that handle terabytes of data daily. You will collaborate closely with product managers, system architects, and cross-functional teams to build intuitive, secure, and robust software solutions.
Phone Screen
reportedInitial call with a recruiter to discuss your background, career goals, and alignment with the role.
What to demonstrate
- Initial call with a recruiter to discuss your background, career goals, and alignment with the role
- Depth in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
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.
Technical Assessment
reportedOnline coding challenge focused on data processing, basic algorithms, and OOP design.
What to demonstrate
- Online coding challenge focused on data processing, basic algorithms, and OOP design
- Depth in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: Write a function that calculates the travel time for a vehicle given distance and speed, then extend the design to support different vehicle types (e.g., sports models) where the speed behavior changes.
- Answer aloud and timed: Implement a 2D array representation of a grid (similar to Conway's Game of Life) where cells are marked as alive or dead based on their neighbors' states, and write a class that allows you to easily modify or flip this logic.
Onsite Panel
reportedVirtual or in-person interviews covering coding, system design, and behavioral discussions.
What to demonstrate
- Virtual or in-person interviews covering coding, system design, and behavioral discussions
- Depth in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: Write a recursive function to reverse a string, and discuss the time and space complexity of your approach.
- Answer aloud and timed: Explain how you would design a relational database schema to represent a student and teacher relationship, and write a SQL query to retrieve specific data based on your schema.
PracHub editorial advice for the preparation topics above.
Always include unit tests
When writing code during live coding sessions or take-home challenges, always write or discuss how you would write unit tests. Interviewers highly value candidates who prioritize software quality and testability.
Clarify vague requirements
If a technical question seems broad or ambiguous, do not jump straight into coding. Ask clarifying questions to define the scope, expected inputs, and edge cases. This demonstrates a structured and professional approach to problem-solving.
Over-communicate your thoughts
During live coding and system design rounds, talk through your thought process out loud. Explain why you are choosing a specific data structure, what trade-offs you are making, and how you plan to structure your solution.
Choose a category, try a prompt, then open its approach, worked solution or follow-up when you need it.
Implement a `Book` class with a searching algorithm using basic data structures like dictionaries, sets, or ar
Implement a Book class with a searching algorithm using basic data structures like dictionaries, sets, or arrays.
Approach
- Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
- Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
- Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
- State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.
Follow-up
- How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
- What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?
Write a function that calculates the travel time for a vehicle given distance and speed, then extend the desig
Write a function that calculates the travel time for a vehicle given distance and speed, then extend the design to support different vehicle types (e.g., sports models) where the speed behavior changes.
Approach
- Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
- Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
- Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
- State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.
Follow-up
- How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
- What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?
Implement a 2D array representation of a grid (similar to Conway's Game of Life) where cells are marked as ali
Implement a 2D array representation of a grid (similar to Conway's Game of Life) where cells are marked as alive or dead based on their neighbors' states, and write a class that allows you to easily modify or flip this logic.
Approach
- Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
- Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
- Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
- State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.
Follow-up
- How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
- What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?
Write a recursive function to reverse a string, and discuss the time and space complexity of your approach.
Write a recursive function to reverse a string, and discuss the time and space complexity of your approach.
Approach
- Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
- Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
- Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
- State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.
Follow-up
- How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
- What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?
How do you prevent race conditions and ensure thread safety in a multi-threaded application where multiple tra
How do you prevent race conditions and ensure thread safety in a multi-threaded application where multiple transactions might occur simultaneously?
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?
Describe a situation where you had to refactor a major component of an application or rewrite an algorithm. Wh
Describe a situation where you had to refactor a major component of an application or rewrite an algorithm. Why was it necessary, and what did you learn?
Approach
- Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
- Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
- Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
- State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.
Follow-up
- How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
- What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?
Explain how you would design a relational database schema to represent a student and teacher relationship, and
Explain how you would design a relational database schema to represent a student and teacher relationship, and write a SQL query to retrieve specific data based on your schema.
Approach
- Name the grain you start from and join outward from it.
- Check whether any join is one-to-many before aggregating, or the sums inflate.
- Say which index the query would use, and what makes it unusable.
- Handle the rows that do not match: that is usually the actual question.
Follow-up
- How does the query change if that join becomes one-to-many?
- What happens to this when the table is ten times larger?
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?
Create a base class for a `Square` and a `Triangle`, then design a `Shape` base class and explain the relation
Create a base class for a Square and a Triangle, then design a Shape base class and explain the relationships and inheritance structure between them.
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?
Walk through the high-level architecture of a web application like YouTube. How would you design a web crawler
Walk through the high-level architecture of a web application like YouTube. How would you design a web crawler to extract and process video URLs efficiently?
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?
Describe how you would design a system to process, format, and sort massive text files or data streams under t
Describe how you would design a system to process, format, and sort massive text files or data streams under tight memory constraints.
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?
Review a hypothetical web application architecture and discuss the pros, cons, and trade-offs of different imp
Review a hypothetical web application architecture and discuss the pros, cons, and trade-offs of different implementation strategies, focusing on scalability and security.
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 approach feedback, especially when a peer or manager points out a flaw in your code or design appro
How do you approach feedback, especially when a peer or manager points out a flaw in your code or design approach?
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?
p99 jumped on one listing filter while p50 stayed flat
After a release that added an owner_user_id filter to the resource listing, p99 rose from 90 ms to 1.9 s while p50 stayed at 40 ms. Traffic and row counts are unchanged. resource carries the index (tenant_id, status, updated_at DESC, resource_id DESC). The new query filters tenant_id and owner_user_id, orders by updated_at DESC, resource_id DESC, and takes 20 rows. On PostgreSQL, explain the shape of the regression, prove it from a query plan, and give the index you would add.
Approach
- Start from the shape. A flat p50 with a moved p99 means a subset of requests changed cost, not all of them, so the first job is naming the subset. Bucket the endpoint's latency by the tenant's row count; the natural hypothesis is that large tenants are a small share of requests and all of the tail.
- Get the plan for the new query on a large tenant with EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS). Expect an index scan over the tenant's range, a filter discarding most of it, then a Sort feeding the Limit, possibly reporting Sort Method: external merge Disk. Read actual rows on the scan node, not estimated.
- Explain why the existing index cannot serve it. A composite B-tree is seekable only as a left prefix, and with no equality predicate on status the scan cannot treat updated_at as an ordering, because rows in the tenant's range are ordered by status first. Everything matching must be read and sorted before LIMIT 20 can apply, so a tenant with 400,000 rows pays 400,000 rows to return 20.
- Add (tenant_id, owner_user_id, updated_at DESC, resource_id DESC). Equality on the first two columns leaves the index ordered by updated_at within that pair, so the plan becomes an index scan that stops after 20 rows with no Sort node. PostgreSQL can scan a B-tree backwards, so the DESC markers matter only if the two sort columns ever disagree in direction; keeping them explicit documents the order the keyset cursor depends on.
Follow-up
- The endpoint paginates with OFFSET. What does page 500 cost with your index, and what does the keyset version cost?
- How would you have caught this before release, given that a 10,000-row seed database produces the same plan shape at an unnoticeable cost?
Built from the rounds and topics Relativity candidates report.
Prepare, practise & reflect
One practical outcome each day. Spend longer where you need it.
0 / 7 done01Map the Relativity loop
- Write out the reported sequence: Phone Screen, Technical Assessment, Onsite Panel.
- 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 Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
- Spend the session on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), which Relativity candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP).
03Work Software Engineering Problem Solving
- Spend the session on Software Engineering Problem Solving, which Relativity candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Software Engineering Problem Solving and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Software Engineering Problem Solving.
04Work Coding Interviews (Live Coding / Whiteboarding)
- Spend the session on Coding Interviews (Live Coding / Whiteboarding), which Relativity candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Coding Interviews (Live Coding / Whiteboarding) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Coding Interviews (Live Coding / Whiteboarding).
05Answer out loud: Object-Oriented Design & Coding
- Answer aloud, timed: Implement a `Book` class with a searching algorithm using basic data structures like dictionaries, sets, or arrays.
- Answer aloud, timed: Create a base class for a `Square` and a `Triangle`, then design a `Shape` base class and explain the relationships and inheritance structure between them.
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Object-Oriented Design & Coding question(s), under time.
06Answer out loud: System & Database Design
- Answer aloud, timed: Explain how you would design a relational database schema to represent a student and teacher relationship, and write a SQL query to retrieve specific data based on your schema.
- Answer aloud, timed: Walk through the high-level architecture of a web application like YouTube. How would you design a web crawler to extract and process video URLs efficiently?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported System & Database Design question(s), under time.
07Answer out loud: Behavioral & Core Values
- Answer aloud, timed: Describe a past technical project you worked on. What were the biggest design challenges you faced, and how did you resolve them?
- Answer aloud, timed: Tell me about a time when you had a communication breakdown or a technical disagreement with a teammate. How did you handle it, and what was the outcome?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Behavioral & Core Values 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.
Describe a past technical project you worked on. What were the biggest design challenges you faced, and how di
Describe a past technical project you worked on. What were the biggest design challenges you faced, and how did you resolve them?
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 a communication breakdown or a technical disagreement with a teammate. How d
Tell me about a time when you had a communication breakdown or a technical disagreement with a teammate. How did you handle it, and what was the outcome?
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?
What is your ultimate professional goal or "dream" in your software engineering career, and how does this role
What is your ultimate professional goal or "dream" in your software engineering career, and how does this role align with 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?
- 01
Describe a past technical project you worked on. What were the biggest design challenges you faced, and how did you resolve them?
- 02
Tell me about a time when you had a communication breakdown or a technical disagreement with a teammate. How did you handle it, and what was the outcome?
- 03
What is your ultimate professional goal or "dream" in your software engineering career, and how does this role align with it?
How much focus is there on LeetCode-style algorithms versus system design?
While you will face basic algorithmic challenges (such as string manipulation, sorting, or basic graph traversal), Relativity's technical interviews focus much more heavily on object-oriented design, database modeling, and practical software engineering principles.
Relativity Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What is the typical timeline from the initial recruiter screen to an offer?
The entire process typically takes between three to four weeks. Relativity is known for its quick turnaround times, often delivering feedback within a few days of each interview stage and making final decisions shortly after the onsite panel.
Relativity Software Engineer candidate reports ↗Can I complete the coding assessments in any programming language?
Yes, you can generally use any language you are highly proficient in for the coding challenges. However, because Relativity's core stack is heavily built on C# and.NET, demonstrating strong skills in an object-oriented language is highly advantageous.
Relativity Software Engineer candidate reports ↗How strictly are the core values evaluated during the interview?
Extremely strictly. The behavioral and cultural rounds are a core part of the evaluation process.
Relativity Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What topics does Relativity test in interviews?
Relativity interviews most often cover Behavioral Interviewing, Stakeholder Management, Project Management, Communication, and Problem Solving. The exact emphasis depends on the specific role you apply for.
Relativity 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.
- 01Relativity 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
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