A Software Engineer at SPX Flow plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between sophisticated industrial engineering and digital innovation. SPX Flow is a global leader in process solutions, providing highly engineered flow components and systems to the food, beverage, and industrial markets. In this role, you are not just writing code; you are contributing to the reliability and efficiency of critical infrastructure that powers essential production lines worldwide.
The work is often interdisciplinary, requiring you to understand the intersection of software development and mechanical or process engineering. You will likely collaborate with hardware teams, mechanical designers, and project managers to ensure that software solutions integrate seamlessly with the physical equipment SPX Flow produces. This position is ideal for engineers who enjoy solving complex, real-world problems where precision and performance are non-negotiable.
Initial Screening
reportedHalf of this call is the part candidates treat as small talk: start date, notice period, work authorisation and its timing, location and time zone, on-call, and the number. Those are what kill offers late, after several engineers have each spent a day. Surfacing a hard constraint now costs you nothing and occasionally buys you something, since a loop compressed to fit a competing deadline can usually only be arranged if it is asked for early. The common failure is deflecting the compensation question twice, then discovering at offer stage that the band never reached your number.
What to demonstrate
- Whether your hard constraints are compatible with the role before a loop gets booked: earliest start, notice period, what authorisation you hold and when it needs action, days on site, willingness to carry a pager
- Whether you give a compensation range with something behind it, such as current total compensation or a competing timeline, rather than leaving the band untested
- Whether your stated timeline is real, since a competing deadline raised now is something scheduling can sometimes work around and the same deadline raised at offer stage usually is not
How to prepare
- Write each constraint down in one line before the call and state them as facts rather than negotiating them live under a question you were not expecting
- Set your range from two or three current data points for that level and location, and name the structure you are quoting in, so the number is comparable to the one they are holding
- If another process is running, say where it stands and by when, and ask directly whether this loop can be scheduled inside that window
Technical Assessment
reportedMost of the time lost in this format is not lost to thinking. It goes to a standard-library call you half-remember, an off-by-one in a loop bound, and a debugging loop that mutates code at random until something passes. When output is wrong, stop re-reading the whole function: take the smallest input that reproduces it and walk the state through by hand, printing intermediates if the environment allows. Guessing at a fix without a failing case you understand is how a five-minute bug becomes twenty, and the clock does not pause while you do it.
What to demonstrate
- Whether you reach the right structure without a detour, and can write it from memory rather than only recall that one exists
- Whether overflow is considered where the language has fixed-width integers, since a signed 32-bit value stops at 2,147,483,647 and then wraps in Java, is undefined behaviour in C++, and does not arise in Python, whose integers grow instead
- Whether recursion depth is treated as a constraint on large inputs, given that CPython's default limit is 1000 frames and a deep recursion can exhaust the stack in any language where an iterative version would not
- Whether a failing case is isolated and explained before any edit is made to the code
How to prepare
- From an empty file and with no references open, implement the pieces you lean on most: a heap push and pop, an iterative DFS with an explicit stack, and a binary search whose midpoint is written lo + (hi - lo) / 2, which avoids the overflow that (lo + hi) / 2 can hit in a fixed-width integer type
- Time yourself on the ten library calls you look up most, such as sorting with a custom comparator, splitting and joining strings, and finding the next key at or above a value in an ordered map, until the lookup is gone
- Take a solution you know is broken and, before touching it, write one sentence naming the input, the expected value and the actual value. Repeat until you do it without deciding to.
Behavioral Interviews
reportedYour first answer is not really what is scored. It buys the follow-up questions, and those decide the round. An interviewer with fifteen minutes takes one thread and pushes on it four or five times, so a story you can only tell at a single level of detail collapses under the third why. That is an argument for fewer stories known deeply rather than one prepared per prompt. Four or five pieces of work you can still explain down to the code you changed and the argument you had about it will cover nearly anything asked in this round.
What to demonstrate
- Whether a story holds as the questioning moves from what you did to why that instead of the alternative, and then to what you would change knowing what you know now
- Whether you can re-cut a project to answer the question actually asked rather than delivering a rehearsed block that answers an adjacent one
- Whether your level of detail is chosen rather than habitual: going down to the schema when the question is about the data model, staying out of it when the question is about the person who disagreed with you
How to prepare
- Pick four projects and write the chain out four levels deep for each: what you did, why that, why not the alternative, and what would have to be true for the alternative to have won. Where you cannot reach the fourth level, you have a placeholder rather than a story
- Have someone ask why three times in a row on a single thread with nothing else added, and mark the point where you start repeating a sentence you already said. That point is where the interviewer stops learning anything
- Build a one-page index instead of an answer bank: the common prompts in this round (disagreement, a failure that was yours, thin requirements, a deadline you missed, work you inherited) mapped to which of your four projects you would use for each, so the choosing is done now rather than while an interviewer waits
PracHub editorial advice for the preparation topics above.
Paginating with LIMIT/OFFSET over a set that changes while the client is reading it
OFFSET n makes the database produce and discard n rows before returning anything, so the cost of a page grows with its depth rather than with its size and page 500 costs five hundred pages of work. The correctness problem is worse than the cost: if a row is inserted or reordered between two page fetches, rows shift across the offset boundary and are either skipped entirely or returned twice, and neither outcome leaves any trace in the response for the client to detect. Keyset pagination - WHERE (sort_key, id) < ($last_sort_key, $last_id) ORDER BY sort_key DESC, id DESC LIMIT n, backed by an index in exactly that order - reads only the rows it returns and is stable against concurrent inserts. It requires the tie-break column: a timestamp is not unique, and duplicate sort keys straddling a page boundary reintroduce the skip it was adopted to remove.
Shipping a migration and the code that depends on it as a single change
During any rolling deploy, and for as long as a rollback remains possible, old and new code execute against the same schema at the same time. A migration that drops or renames a column breaks every instance that has not restarted yet, and code that requires a column the migration has not applied breaks every instance that restarted early. The discipline is expand then contract: add the new column nullable, write both shapes, backfill in batches, move reads across once the backfill is verified, and only then stop writing the old shape and drop it - four deploys, usually spread over days. It feels disproportionate until the first rollback, at which point it is the only reason the previous version still runs.
Assuming the bug is in the framework
Suspect your own code first: read the stack trace top to bottom, check which versions are actually installed rather than which ones you believe are, and reproduce in isolation before blaming a library that thousands of people run daily. When the fault really is upstream, you need that minimal reproduction to say so credibly anyway.
A cache with no invalidation story
Say how an entry goes stale, how long you can serve it stale, and what happens when many requests miss the same key at the same instant. One popular key expiring under load sends every concurrent request to the origin together; single-flight coalescing, jittered expiry, or serving stale while revalidating are the standard answers.
Choose a category, try a prompt, then open its approach, worked solution or follow-up when you need it.
Identify the heaviest tenants in a five-minute window under memory pressure
The edge service handles about 3,000 requests per second across roughly 50,000 tenants, peaking near 9,000. Expose the 50 heaviest tenants by request count over the trailing five minutes so limits can be tightened before one tenant's backfill starves the fleet. You may not retain five minutes of raw records. Give the exact solution and its memory, then the bounded-memory approximation with its error stated as a formula, and say which you would ship and at what tenant cardinality that choice changes.
Approach
- Do the exact version first, because it is affordable at this cardinality: a ring of 300 one-second counters per tenant, advanced lazily, is 1,200 bytes of counters per tenant and roughly 60 to 90 MB for 50,000 tenants with overhead. Carry a running total and subtract the bucket you overwrite so a window read is O(1) rather than 300 adds.
- Extract the top 50 with a size-k min-heap over the tenant sums: O(d log k) for d tenants, against O(d log d) to sort them all. Maintaining the heap continuously instead of on query requires a tenant-to-heap-index map, because incrementing a count already inside the heap means sifting from a known position, and without that map you rebuild the heap on every request.
- State the approximation precisely rather than gesturing at sketches. Misra-Gries with m counters retains every item whose true count exceeds N/(m+1), and each retained count underestimates the truth by at most N/(m+1). With m = 1,000 and N = 900,000 requests in the window the error is roughly 900 requests, which is fine for spotting a tenant sending 50,000 and useless for ranking two tenants 200 apart.
- Say what breaks when the window slides: Misra-Gries and Space-Saving are insert-only and cannot be decremented as records age out. The workable construction is one summary per sub-window, say ten seconds, with 30 summaries merged at query time, and the merged error is the sum of the per-summary errors, so the bound degrades linearly in the number of sub-windows.
- Choose and defend it: at 50,000 tenants the exact rings cost under 100 MB in a process that already holds more, so ship exact. Keep the sketch for the case that actually motivates it, a per-principal or per-IP key where cardinality runs to millions and is not bounded by anything you control.
- Raise the fleet problem before it is asked: each of 20 to 40 instances sees only its share, and the top 50 of one shard is not the top 50 of the fleet. Either aggregate counts centrally or accept that a per-instance threshold multiplied by instance count is the limit you are really enforcing.
Follow-up
- The heaviest tenant is heavy because of one export job rather than user traffic. Should the limiter treat those as the same tenant?
- Two tenants sit tied at the boundary of the top 50. Does your answer flap, and does the flapping matter?
- You switch to per-principal keys and cardinality goes to 10 million. Walk through what changes.
Find overlapping job attempts and peak concurrency from lease records
A day of job_run history yields about 50,000,000 attempt records: (job_run_id, job_type, attempt, started_at, finished_at which is NULL when the worker died, lease_expires_at). Leases expire on a clock, so a job that outran its lease ran twice. Produce (a) every job_run_id whose attempts overlapped in wall-clock time and (b) the peak number of simultaneously running attempts per job_type with the minute it occurred. Target O(n log n). State how you treat a NULL finished_at and what clock skew does to your answer.
Approach
- Define the interval before sorting anything: an attempt occupies [started_at, COALESCE(finished_at, lease_expires_at)). finished_at is observed and lease_expires_at is only a promise, so every attempt without a finish contributes an estimate and the whole result is a lower bound on overlap rather than an exact count.
- For peak concurrency, sweep: emit 2n endpoints, sort by (timestamp, kind) with ends ordered before starts at equal timestamps, then walk the sequence maintaining a counter per job_type and record each type's maximum with its timestamp. O(n log n) dominated by the sort, O(n) space, or O(1) extra if the sort is external and the walk streams.
- For overlap detection, do not compare attempts pairwise. A single global sort by (job_run_id, started_at) gives both the grouping and the order; within a group, keep the maximum end seen so far and report an overlap exactly when the next start is less than that running maximum, which is one linear pass after the sort.
- Half-open intervals matter and are easy to get wrong: with closed intervals an attempt ending at the same millisecond another begins reads as concurrency two, and across 50,000,000 records that artefact swamps the real signal.
- State the clock caveat: started_at and finished_at are written by different workers, so under skew of a few hundred milliseconds an apparent overlap shorter than that bound is not evidence. Filter reported overlaps by a minimum duration, or prefer timestamps written by whichever component heartbeats the lease.
- Scale the sort rather than assuming it fits: the sweep emits two endpoints per attempt, so 50,000,000 records become 100,000,000 endpoints, and at roughly 24 bytes each, an 8-byte timestamp plus a 4-byte job_type plus a kind flag padded to alignment, that is about 2.4 GB of sort keys before any scratch space. Either push the ordering into the database behind an index on (job_type, started_at) or run an external merge sort in chunks; the overlap pass sorts n records rather than 2n, so it is the cheaper of the two.
Follow-up
- A handler is not idempotent and you have found 400 overlapping jobs. Which of them actually caused damage, and what would you query to find out?
- Peak concurrency for one job_type is 4 against a configured cap of 4. Is the cap working, or is the data hiding attempts that never started?
- How would you compute both answers incrementally as records arrive rather than in a daily batch?
Track a rolling failure rate per destination for circuit decisions
The egress service delivers about 1,500 webhooks per second across roughly 40,000 destinations, each call bounded by a 10 second timeout. Maintain, per destination, the failure rate over the trailing 60 seconds so a caller can ask before dispatch whether the circuit should open. Attempts arrive as (destination_id, finished_at_ms, outcome). Requirement: amortised O(1) per attempt, with total memory bounded by the destination count rather than by traffic. Give the structure, its exact memory, and the rule that stops a destination with three attempts from opening a circuit.
Approach
- Name the exact-deque version and then reject it as the default. Holding timestamps and advancing a tail pointer past anything older than now minus 60 seconds is a correct two-pointer window at amortised O(1) per attempt, but its memory tracks in-window traffic, so one destination in a retry storm holds hundreds of thousands of entries while thousands of quiet destinations hold none.
- Use a ring of 60 one-second buckets per destination, each bucket a pair of counters for attempts and failures. On an attempt, advance the ring by the elapsed whole seconds, zeroing at most min(elapsed, 60) buckets, then increment the head. That is amortised O(1) with a fixed footprint per destination.
- State the footprint: 60 buckets times two 4-byte counters is 480 bytes of payload per destination, so 40,000 destinations is roughly 20 to 25 MB with per-entry overhead, bounded by the catalogue rather than by the rate. The cost is granularity, since the oldest bucket ages out in whole seconds, which is far tighter than the decision needs.
- Require a minimum sample before the circuit may open. A destination with three attempts and three failures reads as 100 percent and is not evidence; a floor of roughly 20 attempts in the window makes the ratio meaningful, and below that floor use a run of consecutive failures as the trigger instead.
- Expire idle destinations, or memory grows with every destination ever seen rather than with the live set. Hold the rings in a bounded LRU keyed on destination_id and treat a miss as no history, which is the correct default for an endpoint that has been silent for a minute.
- Keep the half-open probe out of the window arithmetic. After the circuit opens, one probe per interval decides whether to close it, and folding that single success into a window that still holds a 100 percent failure history would reopen the destination on one data point.
Worked solution 20 min
- Define the bucket struct and the advance step: take floor(finished_at_ms / 1000), compare with the ring's current second, zero min(delta, 60) buckets forward, then write into the new head.
- Trace a destination that receives 5 attempts, goes silent for 90 seconds, then receives one more, and confirm the rate is computed from one attempt rather than six.
- Compute total memory for 40,000 destinations at 60 buckets of two 4-byte counters, and state what changes if the window widens to 300 seconds.
- Write the open rule as a single predicate combining the minimum-attempt floor with the rate threshold.
Follow-up
- The fleet is 30 instances and each sees roughly a thirtieth of a destination's traffic. Where does the rate actually live, and what does a per-instance answer get wrong?
- A destination answers in 9.5 seconds and succeeds. It is not failing but it is consuming your per-destination concurrency. What signal should open the circuit here?
- How would you make the window survive a process restart, and is it worth the cost?
Explain why the owner filter ignores the listing index
The only index on resource is (tenant_id, status, updated_at DESC, resource_id DESC). A new endpoint returns one user's resources across all statuses, newest created first: WHERE tenant_id = $1 AND owner_user_id = $2 ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 20. On a tenant with 2M rows it takes 900 ms and EXPLAIN shows a sort above a large scan. Explain precisely why the existing index cannot serve it, give the index that can, and state which of these the new index still will not help: owner_user_id alone across tenants; the same query ordered by updated_at. PostgreSQL 16.
Approach
- Separate the two jobs an index does. For filtering, a composite btree is seekable only on a left prefix, so with no predicate on status the scan can at best range over tenant_id and test owner_user_id per row; PostgreSQL 16 has no btree skip scan to jump the unconstrained column.
- For ordering, the index is sorted by (status, updated_at) within a tenant and not by created_at, so the LIMIT cannot stop early: every matching row is read and then sorted. That is the 'Sort Method: top-N heapsort' line, and it is why the plan reads 2M rows to answer with 20.
- Derive the replacement from the access path — equality, equality, then the ordering column: CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY ON resource (tenant_id, owner_user_id, created_at DESC). The scan seeks to the (tenant, owner) range and walks 20 entries in order, so the Sort node disappears along with the row-read.
- Treat INCLUDE (title, status) as conditional, not free. An index-only scan still visits the heap for any row whose page is not marked all-visible, so on a table taking 1.2k writes/second the win depends on autovacuum keeping the visibility map current, and the wider index costs more on every insert.
- Answer the two negatives explicitly. owner_user_id alone is not a left prefix of the new index, so it degrades to a full scan of the index at best. Ordered by updated_at, the query still seeks on the (tenant, owner) pair but must sort, because only created_at is ordered within that pair.
- Measure both sides with EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) and compare estimated against actual rows at the lowest node — a 2M-versus-200 misestimate there is usually what chose the plan, and adding an index will not fix a statistics problem.
Follow-up
- 90% of rows are status='active'. Would a partial index WHERE status = 'active' change your answer, and for which of the three queries?
- A dashboard runs this for 40 owners in one page load. What changes about the design?
- How do you roll this index out on a table taking 1.2k writes/second, and what does it cost on every insert from then on?
Keep soft-deleted accounts from blocking re-registration
app_user holds user_id, tenant_id, email CITEXT, password_hash (NULL for SSO principals), email_verified_at, auth_version, status ('invited','active','suspended','deactivated'), created_at, updated_at, deleted_at. Two live accounts for one address inside a tenant must be impossible, but an address freed by a soft delete must be reusable, and the same tenant may delete and re-register it repeatedly. Write the uniqueness DDL for PostgreSQL 16, then the equivalent for MySQL 8 where partial indexes do not exist, and say what each permits once three deleted rows already hold that address.
Approach
- Start from what is actually unique: not (tenant_id, email), but (tenant_id, email) among live rows. PostgreSQL says that directly — CREATE UNIQUE INDEX app_user_live_email ON app_user (tenant_id, email) WHERE deleted_at IS NULL. A full constraint over the same two columns burns the address permanently the first time someone deletes an account.
- Keep case-insensitivity in the type or the index, never in the application: CITEXT as given, or UNIQUE (tenant_id, lower(email)) as an expression index where the extension is unavailable. A case-sensitive unique column is exactly how two accounts for one human appear.
- For MySQL 8 the predicate has to move inside the key: add a discriminator column that is a constant 0 while the row is live and is set to user_id on delete, with UNIQUE (tenant_id, email, deleted_marker). Live rows share the constant and still collide; deleted rows differ from each other and stop colliding.
- State the NULL variant and its dependency: leaving the marker NULL for deleted rows also works, because a unique index treats NULLs as distinct — true in MySQL, and true in PostgreSQL only under the default NULLS DISTINCT, which PostgreSQL 15 lets you reverse. Check the polarity against the three existing deleted rows: constant-on-live is what preserves the collision you want, and reversing it silently admits duplicate live accounts.
- Say what a soft delete must do besides setting deleted_at: increment auth_version so existing tokens stop validating, leave resource.owner_user_id and resource_revision.actor_user_id intact, and accept that the address is retained — erasure is a different requirement answered by scrubbing the column, not by a DELETE that would break those references.
Worked solution 20 min
- Create the PostgreSQL partial unique index, insert a live row, soft delete it, and insert the same address again.
- Repeat the delete-and-reinsert cycle three times and confirm three deleted rows coexist with exactly one live row.
- Write the MySQL form with the discriminator, then deliberately reverse the polarity so live rows carry NULL, and show two live duplicates commit.
- Attempt a second live insert on both engines and map the resulting 23505 / ER_DUP_ENTRY to the 409 the handler should return.
Follow-up
- A deleted account re-registers with the same address the next day. Do the old resource rows follow the new user_id, and how does the API keep the two principals apart?
- How do you honour an erasure request while resource_revision.actor_user_id still references this table?
- What changes if a user may hold membership in two tenants?
Can you discuss the technical details of your past projects involving …
Can you discuss the technical details of your past projects involving complex systems?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
Explain the different types of API seal plans.
Explain the different types of API seal plans.
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
Design the async export contract a client can resume safely
A tenant asks for a CSV of every resource. The work runs for minutes on the worker fleet through a job_run row carrying a lease, an attempt count and a dedupe_key, far past the edge's 400 ms budget. Callers are a browser that polls and a script that walks away and checks later. Specify what the submit call returns, the operation resource and its states, how a duplicate submit is handled, how a client learns about completion, what cancellation means given that a lease can expire mid-run, and how the result is fetched and when it expires.
Approach
- Split the API in two. Submit returns 202 with an operation id and a location to poll, and never blocks on the work. The operation is a real resource with its own lifecycle - queued, running, succeeded, failed, cancelled - plus attempt, a monotonic progress figure, and a terminal error drawn from the same code taxonomy the synchronous endpoints use, so a client needs one error vocabulary rather than two.
- Deduplicate at submit using job_run.dedupe_key, unique over (job_type, dedupe_key) while status is 'queued' or 'running': a repeat submit of the same logical export returns 200 with the existing operation instead of 202 with a new one, and the partial index deliberately permits a legitimate re-run once the first has finished. Pair it with the request's idempotency key so an HTTP-level retry of the submit is exact rather than merely similar.
- Tell the poller how to poll: Retry-After on the polling response, a minimum interval enforced at the edge, and a documented maximum lifetime after which an operation is reaped. Polling is the contract of record; the webhook is the fast path, and both must lead to the same terminal state, so a client that receives the completion event and then polls anyway sees no contradiction.
- Be exact about cancellation. A cancel request records intent; it cannot stop work already executing. The handler reads the flag at checkpoints, and because a lease expires on a clock that cannot distinguish a dead worker from a slow one, a second copy may start after the cancel was recorded - so the handler re-reads the flag immediately after claiming the lease. 'cancelled' becomes terminal only when no lease is outstanding; reporting it earlier shows a client a stopped job while a worker is still writing output.
- Make the handler safe to run twice, because the lease guarantees that it will be. Write output to a deterministic object key derived from the operation id so a second copy overwrites its own work instead of appending a second file, and record completion with a conditional update that only the copy holding the current lease can win.
- Treat result fetch as a separate authorised read: a short-lived signed URL, the tenant checked when it is issued rather than only when the file was produced, and a documented retention after which the operation remains terminal but the bytes are gone - a state the client must be able to tell apart from a failure.
Worked solution 40 min
- Write the submit request and its two possible responses, 202 for new and 200 for a duplicate, and the dedupe_key construction.
- Draw the operation state machine, marking which transitions a client may observe and which are terminal.
- Write the cancellation sequence across a lease expiry, showing where the second copy reads the flag.
- Define the output key, the completion update's predicate, and why both are needed for a double run.
- Specify result fetch: URL lifetime, authorisation point, retention, and the distinct response once the bytes are gone.
Follow-up
- An operation has said 'running' for 40 minutes and the worker is gone. What does the client see, and which columns in job_run decide that?
- Two tenants each submit 50 exports at once. What in this contract stops one of them delaying the other?
- The customer wants the export emailed instead. What changes, and what becomes harder to make exactly-once?
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.
- Fix permanently by bounding handler attempts and dead-lettering on exhaustion, so no single message can stop a partition. Then replay the dead-lettered event once the handler is fixed: it carries aggregate_id and aggregate_version, so a consumer that discards versions it has already applied can absorb the replay, and resource_revision is the fallback if the event itself is unusable.
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?
- What changes if the message is poison because a previous deploy wrote a payload shape the current code cannot parse?
Four days sample coding, design, fundamentals and the practical rounds at deliberately shallow depth, which is enough to surface the topics you did not know were in scope. That map, rather than a guess made on day one, decides where the last three days go.
Prepare, practise & reflect
One practical outcome each day. Spend longer where you need it.
0 / 7 done01Coding, one pass at shallow depth
- Solve one problem from each of six families, an array with two pointers, hash counting, binary search, a tree traversal, a graph traversal and one dynamic program, under a hard twenty-minute cap with no extensions, marking each finished, late, or stalled.
- For every stall, write the exact move you could not make rather than the subject, so the note reads could not turn the recurrence into a loop rather than bad at dynamic programming.
- Fix nothing today. The value of the pass is the unfixed record.
Deliverable: Six timed attempts marked finished, late or stalled, each stall carrying a named blocking move.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗02Design, one pass at shallow depth
- Spend twenty minutes each on three different shapes, a read-heavy feed, a write-heavy ingest path, and something needing a transaction across two entities, stopping each at requirements, interface and data model.
- After each, write the first question you could not answer, which is usually a number you could not estimate or a failure mode you had no vocabulary for.
- Mark which of the three you would be most relieved not to be asked, and treat that as data rather than as a preference.
Deliverable: Three shallow designs, each with the first unanswerable question written at the bottom.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗03Fundamentals and the practical rounds
- Answer eight short questions in writing at four minutes each, covering the material that fills the gaps between the big rounds: what happens between a URL and a rendered page, what an index costs on write, when a process is preferable to a thread, and what conditions a deadlock requires.
- Do one thirty-minute practical task of the kind a take-home compresses: read an unfamiliar two-hundred-line file and write what it does, what you would change, and the one thing you remain unsure of.
- Score every answer fluent, correct but slow, or absent, and keep the absent ones visible.
Deliverable: Eight scored short answers and one written reading of unfamiliar code.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗04The rounds that are about you, and the map
- Deliver three behavioural answers aloud against a timer, a conflict, a failure you owned, and a decision made without enough information, marking any that ran past three minutes or contained no number.
- Assemble the map: every marked item from days one to three on a single page, sorted by how likely it is to appear in your loop rather than by how uncomfortable it felt.
- Choose exactly two areas for the remaining three days and write down what you are deliberately abandoning.
Deliverable: A one-page scored map of the whole surface area with two areas chosen and the rest explicitly abandoned.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗05First chosen area, to the depth you skipped
- Work the higher-ranked area in four focused blocks, choosing items one level above where you stalled rather than repeating what already works.
- After each block write the rule you extracted in one sentence with its precondition attached, since a rule carrying no precondition is exactly what fails under a variation.
- Re-attempt the day-one or day-two item that exposed this area and compare against the original timing.
Deliverable: Four worked blocks, a timed re-attempt against the original, and three one-sentence rules with preconditions.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗06Second chosen area, where the gap is coverage rather than speed
- Treat the second area differently from the first. Day five drilled something you could already half-do; this one is usually a topic you had simply never met, so build one worked reference example end to end and keep it, rather than attempting six problems badly.
- Write down the vocabulary you were missing on day two or three, five terms at most, each with the one sentence that makes it usable in an answer rather than the textbook definition.
- Redo the shallow attempt that exposed this area and note whether you now fail later in the problem, because moving the failure point is the realistic gain from a single day and is worth more than a score that did not change.
Deliverable: One worked reference example for the newly covered area, a five-term vocabulary list, and a note on where the failure point moved.
Practice prompt ↗Practice prompt ↗07Reassemble the loop
- Sit two rounds back to back with no gap, ordering them so the area you chose second comes last, because the map was built from rested, isolated attempts and the loop will reach your weaker area when you are already spent.
- Write where the second round suffered from the first, which is normally the point at which structure collapses into narration.
- Reduce the week to one page holding only the rules you can state without reading them.
Deliverable: Mock notes on cross-round carryover plus a one-page card of rules you can recite from memory.
Practice prompt ↗Worked solution ↗Expand any day for tasks and deliverables. Your progress is saved on this device.
Engineers over-index on what they repaired. A stronger answer covers something you knowingly left broken: the alert you tuned down, the data inconsistency you documented instead of chasing, the cleanup you deferred past two quarters. Give the reasoning and the condition that would have reopened it, so it reads as a decision and not as neglect.
What is your long-term vision for your role within this team?
What is your long-term vision for your role within this team?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
Follow-up
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
- What did you decide not to do, and why?
What specifically about this position at SPX Flow interests you?
What specifically about this position at SPX Flow interests you?
Approach
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
Follow-up
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
- What did you decide not to do, and why?
Describe a situation where you failed to find the right solution; how …
Describe a situation where you failed to find the right solution; how did you handle it?
Approach
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- What did you decide not to do, and why?
Describe your experience with GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning and Toleran…
Describe your experience with GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing).
Approach
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
Follow-up
- What did you decide not to do, and why?
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- 01
What is your long-term vision for your role within this team?
- 02
What specifically about this position at SPX Flow interests you?
- 03
Describe a situation where you failed to find the right solution; how did you handle it?
- 04
Describe your experience with GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing).
Is this an official SPX Flow interview guide?
No. It is PracHub's own research and practice material for the Software Engineer role at SPX Flow. Rounds and questions reflect what candidates have reported, not a process SPX Flow has published, and they change over time. Confirm the current format and scope with your recruiter.
PracHub interview research ↗How long does the interview process typically take?
The process can range from a few weeks to several months depending on the specific department and location. It is best to maintain regular contact with your recruiter.
PracHub interview research ↗What differentiates successful candidates?
Successful candidates are those who demonstrate both technical mastery and a clear understanding of how their work contributes to the broader business goals of SPX Flow.
PracHub interview research ↗Is the interview process mostly technical or behavioral?
It is a mix of both. You should expect technical rounds that test your domain knowledge and behavioral rounds that assess your leadership and collaboration skills.
PracHub interview research ↗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.
- 01PracHub interview research ↗
PracHub editorial research into this company and role, maintained with this guide. Candidate-reported, not an employer publication.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22 - 02PracHub Software Engineer practice ↗
Cross-company practice questions for this role.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22 - 03PracHub interview preparation framework ↗
The framework the preparation plan follows.
PracHub page · Accessed 2026-09-22
Explore related engineering environments and compare the preparation focus.
SIG (Susquehanna) Software Engineer Interview Questions & Guide 2026
Database practice for SIG (Susquehanna) candidates: how an index changes a query plan, and which anomalies survive a given isolation level, since read committed still permits non-repeatable reads.
AbsenceSoft Software Engineer Interview Questions & Guide 2026
What AbsenceSoft asks Software Engineer candidates, from reported rounds and questions.
Ziphq Software Engineer Interview Guide
Data structures and algorithms practice for Ziphq candidates, where stating a bound means stating its precondition: constant-time hash lookup is an average case over keys that spread.
Airwallex Software Engineer Interview Guide
Failure-handling practice for Airwallex software engineer candidates: requests whose outcome a timeout leaves unknown, where a retry is safe, and deduplicating at the receiver instead of assuming exactly-once delivery.