A Software Engineer at Tempus AI sits at the critical intersection of technology, data science, and precision medicine. The company's mission is to gather, structure, and analyze clinical and genomic data to help physicians make real-time, data-driven decisions for cancer care and other therapeutic areas. In this role, you will be responsible for building the scalable platforms, robust APIs, and data pipelines that make this massive library of clinical data accessible and actionable. The impact of your work in this position is direct and profound. By writing clean, efficient, and highly secure code, you enable healthcare providers to match patients with personalized clinical trials and targeted therapies. You will work on sophisticated systems that handle complex genomic sequencing data, natural language processing tools to extract insights from unstructured clinical notes, and user-facing applications utilized by thousands of oncologists daily. This is a fast-paced, mission-driven engineering environment where technical rigor meets medical innovation. Teams at Tempus AI operate with high autonomy, requiring engineers who are not only technically excellent but also deeply curious about the domain space. Whether you are optimizing a database query to search through millions of records or designing a secure microservice, your contributions directly accelerate the pace of clinical discovery.
Recruiter Screen
reportedInitial screening call with a recruiter to assess your fit for the role.
What to demonstrate
- Initial screening call with a recruiter to assess your fit for the role
- Depth in Coding interviews (timed exercises)
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.
Online Technical Assessment
reportedRigorous online assessment testing coding capabilities, serving as a critical gatekeeper.
What to demonstrate
- Rigorous online assessment testing coding capabilities, serving as a critical gatekeeper
- Depth in Coding interviews (timed exercises)
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: Implement a function that processes an input stream of genomic coordinates and merges overlapping intervals.
- Answer aloud and timed: Write a program in JavaScript that displays specific text patterns based on dynamic input parameters and edge-case constraints.
Hiring Manager Screen
reportedDiscussion with the hiring manager to evaluate your qualifications and fit for the team.
What to demonstrate
- Discussion with the hiring manager to evaluate your qualifications and fit for the team
- Depth in Coding interviews (timed exercises)
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.
Multi-Stage Virtual Onsite
reportedSeries of virtual interviews focusing on coding, API design, and system architecture.
What to demonstrate
- Series of virtual interviews focusing on coding, API design, and system architecture
- Depth in Coding interviews (timed exercises)
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: Given a schema of medical tests and results, write a query to find the top three most frequently ordered tests per hospital department.
- Answer aloud and timed: Explain the performance differences between SQL and NoSQL databases when storing unstructured clinical notes versus structured patient records.
PracHub editorial advice for the preparation topics above.
Master SQL Querying
Do not underestimate the database portion of the evaluation. Brush up on complex joins, aggregations, window functions, and indexing strategies, as SQL is a core component of the initial online assessment.
Be Prepared for JavaScript Specifics
If you are interviewing for a full-stack or frontend-heavy role, expect deep-dive questions on JavaScript quirks, asynchronous behavior, and React state management. Ensure you are comfortable writing functional JS code without relying on external libraries.
Communicate Your Architectural Trade-offs
During the system design interview, do not just present a single solution. Discuss the pros and cons of your design decisions, such as choosing SQL over NoSQL, or synchronous APIs over event-driven architectures, particularly in the context of scaling healthcare data.
Connect with the Mission
Tempus AI is deeply committed to precision medicine. Take time to understand their products, their data-driven approach to oncology, and be ready to articulate why you want to apply your engineering skills to this specific domain space.
Choose a category, try a prompt, then open its approach, worked solution or follow-up when you need it.
Write a function to calculate the TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) score for a set of clinic
Write a function to calculate the TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) score for a set of clinical documents.
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?
Given a string of brackets and characters, determine if the input string is valid and correctly balanced.
Given a string of brackets and characters, determine if the input string is valid and correctly balanced.
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 function that processes an input stream of genomic coordinates and merges overlapping intervals.
Implement a function that processes an input stream of genomic coordinates and merges overlapping intervals.
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 program in JavaScript that displays specific text patterns based on dynamic input parameters and edge-
Write a program in JavaScript that displays specific text patterns based on dynamic input parameters and edge-case constraints.
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?
Solve a medium-level array manipulation problem, focusing on optimizing time complexity while keeping space us
Solve a medium-level array manipulation problem, focusing on optimizing time complexity while keeping space usage minimal.
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 SQL query to join a patient demographics table with a clinical trials table, filtering for specific ge
Write a SQL query to join a patient demographics table with a clinical trials table, filtering for specific genetic mutations and grouping by age.
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?
Given a schema of medical tests and results, write a query to find the top three most frequently ordered tests
Given a schema of medical tests and results, write a query to find the top three most frequently ordered tests per hospital department.
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?
Explain the performance differences between SQL and NoSQL databases when storing unstructured clinical notes v
Explain the performance differences between SQL and NoSQL databases when storing unstructured clinical notes versus structured patient records.
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?
Optimize a slow-running SQL query that utilizes multiple subqueries and window functions.
Optimize a slow-running SQL query that utilizes multiple subqueries and window functions.
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?
Design a scalable web service (REST API) using Node.js and Express that allows doctors to query patient record
Design a scalable web service (REST API) using Node.js and Express that allows doctors to query patient records securely.
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 architecture of a real-time data ingestion pipeline that processes high-throughput genomic se
Walk through the architecture of a real-time data ingestion pipeline that processes high-throughput genomic sequencing files.
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?
Design a notification service that alerts clinical research coordinators when a patient matches a new clinical
Design a notification service that alerts clinical research coordinators when a patient matches a new clinical trial protocol.
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 would you handle state management and performance optimization in a complex, data-heavy dashboard built wi
How would you handle state management and performance optimization in a complex, data-heavy dashboard built with React?
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?
Edge instances grow 400 MB per hour until the nightly restart
Edge API instances start at 700 MB resident and grow about 400 MB/hour; a nightly rolling restart has hidden it for weeks. Growth continues unchanged when request rate halves overnight, p99 degrades in the last hours before an instance is recycled, and heap used immediately after a forced full GC rises monotonically. The service holds no product state. Name the discriminating measurement that separates the plausible causes, give the most likely cause, and give the fix and how you would verify it.
Approach
- Separate resident memory from live heap first, because they fail differently. Resident size can grow from fragmentation, native buffers or thread stacks while the heap is flat; heap used after a full GC rising monotonically is the measurement that says objects are reachable and not being released. You already have it, so this is retention, not fragmentation, and that closes off half the candidate list.
- Use the rate's independence from traffic as the discriminator. Growth that continues at half the request rate rules out per-request objects that are merely slow to collect and points at a structure that grows with distinct values observed rather than with call volume. Write the candidates that have that property: a metrics registry keyed on a high-cardinality label, an unevicted cache, an interner, a per-key lock map.
- Take two heap snapshots an hour apart and diff by retained size, reading the dominator tree, not by allocation count or instance count. Expect one root holding a map with millions of entries, then follow the reference chain to the code that inserts and never removes. Allocation profilers point at churn, which is the wrong signal here.
- The candidate that fits this service is an observability label carrying an identifier, such as a request path recorded before templating so that /v1/resources/48213 becomes its own metric series. That grows with distinct ids seen, is independent of rate, and explains the late p99 degradation, since GC cost rises with the size of the live set.
Follow-up
- Post-GC heap is now flat but resident size still creeps. What are you looking at, and does it matter?
- How would you have detected this before an OOM, given the nightly restart masked the trend?
Built from the rounds and topics Tempus AI candidates report.
Prepare, practise & reflect
One practical outcome each day. Spend longer where you need it.
0 / 7 done01Map the Tempus AI loop
- Write out the reported sequence: Recruiter Screen, Online Technical Assessment, Hiring Manager Screen, Multi-Stage Virtual Onsite.
- 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 4 reported rounds, with the weakest marked.
02Work Coding interviews (timed exercises)
- Spend the session on Coding interviews (timed exercises), which Tempus AI candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Coding interviews (timed exercises) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Coding interviews (timed exercises).
03Work JavaScript
- Spend the session on JavaScript, which Tempus AI candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in JavaScript and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in JavaScript.
04Work System design
- Spend the session on System design, which Tempus AI candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in System design and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in System design.
05Answer out loud: Coding & Algorithms
- Answer aloud, timed: Write a function to calculate the TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) score for a set of clinical documents.
- Answer aloud, timed: Given a string of brackets and characters, determine if the input string is valid and correctly balanced.
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Coding & Algorithms question(s), under time.
06Answer out loud: Database & SQL
- Answer aloud, timed: Write a SQL query to join a patient demographics table with a clinical trials table, filtering for specific genetic mutations and grouping by age.
- Answer aloud, timed: Given a schema of medical tests and results, write a query to find the top three most frequently ordered tests per hospital department.
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Database & SQL question(s), under time.
07Answer out loud: System Design & Architecture
- Answer aloud, timed: Design a scalable web service (REST API) using Node.js and Express that allows doctors to query patient records securely.
- Answer aloud, timed: Walk through the architecture of a real-time data ingestion pipeline that processes high-throughput genomic sequencing files.
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported System Design & Architecture 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.
Why do you want to work at Tempus AI, and how does your background align with our mission in precision medicin
Why do you want to work at Tempus AI, and how does your background align with our mission in precision medicine?
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 time when you had to work with shifting priorities and tight deadlines. How did you ensure the qual
Describe a time when you had to work with shifting priorities and tight deadlines. How did you ensure the quality of your deliverables?
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?
Talk about a challenging technical conflict you had with a teammate. How did you resolve it, and what was the
Talk about a challenging technical conflict you had with a teammate. How did you resolve 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?
Tell me about a past project where you had to quickly learn a new technology or domain space to deliver a feat
Tell me about a past project where you had to quickly learn a new technology or domain space to deliver a feature.
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
Why do you want to work at Tempus AI, and how does your background align with our mission in precision medicine?
- 02
Describe a time when you had to work with shifting priorities and tight deadlines. How did you ensure the quality of your deliverables?
- 03
Talk about a challenging technical conflict you had with a teammate. How did you resolve it, and what was the outcome?
- 04
Tell me about a past project where you had to quickly learn a new technology or domain space to deliver a feature.
How difficult is the Software Engineer interview process at Tempus AI?
Candidates generally describe the process as average to difficult. The technical standards are high, particularly regarding SQL proficiency and code correctness during the online assessment. However, the questions themselves are practical and representative of real-world engineering challenges rather than highly abstract algorithms.
Tempus AI Software Engineer candidate reports ↗Can I choose my preferred programming language for the coding interviews?
For the online assessment, you can typically choose from a variety of standard languages. However, for live coding rounds, some teams may require or strongly prefer that you use specific technologies like JavaScript/Node.js or Python, depending on the stack of the team you are interviewing for. It is best to clarify this with your recruiter before the onsite.
Tempus AI Software Engineer candidate reports ↗How long does the entire interview process take from start to finish?
The typical timeline spans 3 to 4 weeks. Tempus AI recruiters are often very quick to initiate the process, but scheduling multiple rounds of virtual onsite interviews with busy engineering leads can sometimes introduce delays. Some candidates have experienced communication delays or automated rejections after completing final-round interviews. It is highly recommended to maintain active communication with your recruiter and continue exploring other opportunities until a formal offer is in hand.
Tempus AI Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What is the work culture like for software engineers at the company?
The engineering culture is fast-paced, highly collaborative, and deeply mission-driven. Teams operate with a high level of ownership, which means you will have the opportunity to make a significant impact quickly, but you must also be comfortable navigating shifting priorities and fast product iterations.
Tempus AI Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What topics does Tempus AI test in interviews?
Tempus AI interviews most often cover Stakeholder Management, Requirements Gathering, SQL, Python, and Data Analysis. The exact emphasis depends on the specific role you apply for.
Tempus AI 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.
- 01Tempus AI 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
Explore related engineering environments and compare the preparation focus.
Discord Software Engineer Interview Guide
Database practice for Discord candidates: how an index changes a query plan, and which anomalies survive a given isolation level, since read committed still permits non-repeatable reads.
Rystad Energy Software Engineer Interview Guide
Prepare for Rystad Energy software interviews with worked Python validation, OOP and decorator examples, plus an ingestion case and practical checks.
Zwift Software Engineer Interview Guide
What Zwift asks Software Engineer candidates, from reported rounds and questions.
Zumper Software Engineer Interview Guide
What Zumper asks Software Engineer candidates, from reported rounds and questions.