The Software Engineer role at UNC Chapel Hill is pivotal for driving innovation and enhancing the university's digital landscape. As a Software Engineer, you will contribute to a variety of projects that impact not only the university’s operations but also the experience of students, faculty, and staff. Your work will involve developing and maintaining software applications that facilitate teaching, research, and administrative functions, thus directly supporting the university's mission to educate, innovate, and serve the community. Engagement with diverse teams across campus ensures that your contributions are both meaningful and far-reaching. You will work on projects that range from improving internal systems to developing tools that enhance the learning environment. This role is not just about coding; it is about solving complex problems and creating solutions that are scalable and sustainable, making it an exciting opportunity for those looking to make a difference through technology.
Phone Screening
reportedInitial phone screening to assess candidate's background and fit for the role.
What to demonstrate
- Initial phone screening to assess candidate's background and fit for the role
- Depth in Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code
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 Assessments
reportedCandidates may undergo one or more technical assessments to evaluate their skills.
What to demonstrate
- Candidates may undergo one or more technical assessments to evaluate their skills
- Depth in Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: What programming languages are you proficient in and which do you prefer for certain tasks?
- Answer aloud and timed: How do you ensure your code is maintainable and scalable?
Behavioral Interviews
reportedInterviews focused on understanding past work experiences and alignment with team needs.
What to demonstrate
- Interviews focused on understanding past work experiences and alignment with team needs
- Depth in Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code
How to prepare
- Prepare three examples from your own work, each with a decision you made and an outcome you can quantify.
- Re-read the description of the behavioral interviews above and write down what you would ask to confirm before it.
Stakeholder Discussions
reportedMeetings with various stakeholders to gauge fit and alignment with team goals.
What to demonstrate
- Meetings with various stakeholders to gauge fit and alignment with team goals
- Depth in Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: How do you handle conflicts within a team?
- Answer aloud and timed: Can you provide an example of how you influenced a project’s direction?
PracHub editorial advice for the preparation topics above.
Understand the University’s Mission
Familiarize yourself with the goals and values of UNC Chapel Hill, as this will come up in discussions around culture fit.
Prepare for Technical Questions
Brush up on your coding skills and be ready to solve problems live during the interview.
Demonstrate Collaborative Spirit
Highlight experiences that showcase your teamwork and ability to work well with diverse groups.
Ask Insightful Questions
Prepare thoughtful questions about the team and projects to demonstrate your interest and engagement in the role.
Choose a category, try a prompt, then open its approach, worked solution or follow-up when you need it.
Explain the difference between synchronous and asynchronous programming.
Explain the difference between synchronous and asynchronous programming.
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?
Write a function to reverse a linked list.
Write a function to reverse a linked list.
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 would you implement a binary search algorithm?
How would you implement a binary search algorithm?
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?
Can you explain the time complexity of your solution for this problem?
Can you explain the time complexity of your solution for this problem?
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?
What data structures would you use to solve this problem and why?
What data structures would you use to solve this problem and why?
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?
Denormalise tenant onto revisions and backfill it live
resource_revision (revision_id, resource_id, version, actor_user_id, change_kind, patch, request_id, created_at) has 400M rows and no tenant column; tenant_id lives only on resource. Two reads need it: a tenant-scoped audit feed ordered by created_at DESC, and an offboarding purge. Both join back to resource today. Justify adding tenant_id to resource_revision against those two reads, name the anomaly the copy introduces and the constraint that prevents it, then give the ordered migration for a live table taking 1.2k writes/second — the lock each step takes, how the backfill is batched, and where each step stops being reversible. PostgreSQL 16.
Approach
- Justify from the access path rather than from taste. Without the column, the audit feed either scans resource_revision by created_at and discards other tenants' rows, or resolves the tenant's resource_ids first and probes with them — both proportional to the tenant's whole history rather than to one page. With (tenant_id, created_at DESC, revision_id DESC) it is a seek that stops at 50 rows, and the purge becomes a ranged delete instead of a join.
- Name the cost exactly: a second copy of a fact can disagree with the first. Make the disagreement unwritable rather than documented — add UNIQUE (resource_id, tenant_id) on resource so it can serve as a foreign-key target, then FOREIGN KEY (resource_id, tenant_id) REFERENCES resource (resource_id, tenant_id) on the revision table. A revision can then only ever carry its parent's tenant.
- Step one, expand: ALTER TABLE resource_revision ADD COLUMN tenant_id BIGINT NULL, with no default, so it is a catalogue change and no rewrite. It still needs ACCESS EXCLUSIVE for an instant, and that instant queues behind the longest open transaction on the table while every later query queues behind it — set lock_timeout to 2s and retry rather than wait.
- Step two, dual-write: deploy the writer that populates tenant_id on every new revision while reads still use the join. Reversible by redeploying the previous build, because nothing reads the column yet.
Follow-up
- The backfill is half finished and a rollback is required. What state is the table in, and what does the previous build do with a half-populated column?
- How do you verify the backfill actually finished, given rows are still being inserted while it runs?
Hold a per-tenant active cap against concurrent creates
A tenant on the standard plan may hold at most 50 resources with status='active'. The create handler runs SELECT count(*) FROM resource WHERE tenant_id = $1 AND status = 'active', compares to 50, then inserts. Two creates arrive 3 ms apart on different instances and the tenant lands at 51. Name the anomaly, say whether PostgreSQL 16 READ COMMITTED or REPEATABLE READ prevents it and why, then give an implementation that holds the cap at READ COMMITTED with the exact statements. Finally, say what changes when the cap is 'at most one running export per tenant' on job_run.
Approach
- Name it: write skew. The two transactions read an overlapping set and write disjoint rows, so there is no row-level conflict for the engine to detect and each commit is individually legal.
- Rule out the levels precisely. READ COMMITTED takes a fresh snapshot per statement and takes no lock on the counted rows, so both see 49. PostgreSQL's REPEATABLE READ is snapshot isolation: it removes non-repeatable reads and phantoms within the snapshot but still admits write skew, because the anomaly is not a re-read of a changed row, it is a read of a set that a concurrent transaction invalidates. Only SERIALIZABLE closes it, by tracking the read dependency and aborting one transaction with SQLSTATE 40001 — a guarantee that exists only if the application re-runs the whole transaction from the read.
- Convert the set predicate into a single-row conflict: keep tenant.active_resource_count and run UPDATE tenant SET active_resource_count = active_resource_count + 1 WHERE tenant_id = $1 AND active_resource_count < 50 in the same transaction as the INSERT. Zero affected rows is the cap, returned as 409. The row lock serialises the decision at any isolation level, and contention is bounded to one tenant's row — which is also the fair-scheduling unit, unlike a global counter that would convoy every tenant behind one row.
- State the cost you just took on: a counter is a second source of truth that can drift, so every path that changes status must adjust it inside the same transaction, and a periodic reconciliation has to exist, with resource_revision as the authority for what the count should have been.
Follow-up
- A resource moves from archived back to active. Which statements change, and what breaks if the counter update and the status change land in different transactions?
- The cap becomes plan-dependent and a plan can change mid-month. Where does the number 50 live, and who reads it?
Can you describe a challenging technical problem you solved in a previous project?
Can you describe a challenging technical problem you solved in a previous project?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
What programming languages are you proficient in and which do you prefer for certain tasks?
What programming languages are you proficient in and which do you prefer for certain tasks?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
How do you ensure your code is maintainable and scalable?
How do you ensure your code is maintainable and scalable?
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?
Given a hypothetical system, how would you design it to handle X number of users?
Given a hypothetical system, how would you design it to handle X number of users?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
If a critical software failure occurs, what steps would you take to diagnose and address the issue?
If a critical software failure occurs, what steps would you take to diagnose and address the issue?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
How would you approach optimizing a slow-running application?
How would you approach optimizing a slow-running application?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
How do you approach debugging a complex software issue?
How do you approach debugging a complex software issue?
Approach
- Establish what changed and when, before forming any theory.
- Pick a bisection that eliminates candidates whichever way it turns out.
- Check the instrumentation before believing the symptom.
- Separate the trigger from the cause; the deploy is rarely the bug.
Follow-up
- What would you look at first, and what would it rule out?
- How would you tell a cause from a coincidence here?
Built from the rounds and topics UNC Chapel Hill candidates report.
Prepare, practise & reflect
One practical outcome each day. Spend longer where you need it.
0 / 7 done01Map the UNC Chapel Hill loop
- Write out the reported sequence: Phone Screening, Technical Assessments, Behavioral Interviews, Stakeholder Discussions.
- 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 Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code
- Spend the session on Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code, which UNC Chapel Hill candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Code Walkthrough / Explaining Existing Code.
03Work Programming (Writing Code)
- Spend the session on Programming (Writing Code), which UNC Chapel Hill candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Programming (Writing Code) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Programming (Writing Code).
04Work Project Experience (Prior Projects Detail)
- Spend the session on Project Experience (Prior Projects Detail), which UNC Chapel Hill candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Project Experience (Prior Projects Detail) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Project Experience (Prior Projects Detail).
05Answer out loud: Technical / Domain Questions
- Answer aloud, timed: How do you approach debugging a complex software issue?
- Answer aloud, timed: Can you describe a challenging technical problem you solved in a previous project?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Technical / Domain Questions question(s), under time.
06Answer out loud: Behavioral / Leadership
- Answer aloud, timed: Describe a time when you had to work under tight deadlines. How did you manage it?
- Answer aloud, timed: How do you handle conflicts within a team?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Behavioral / Leadership question(s), under time.
07Answer out loud: Problem-Solving / Case Studies
- Answer aloud, timed: Given a hypothetical system, how would you design it to handle X number of users?
- Answer aloud, timed: If a critical software failure occurs, what steps would you take to diagnose and address the issue?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Problem-Solving / Case Studies 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 time when you had to work under tight deadlines. How did you manage it?
Describe a time when you had to work under tight deadlines. How did you manage it?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
How do you handle conflicts within a team?
How do you handle conflicts within a team?
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?
Can you provide an example of how you influenced a project’s direction?
Can you provide an example of how you influenced a project’s direction?
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 motivates you to excel in your work?
What motivates you to excel in your work?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
How do you prioritize multiple projects with competing deadlines?
How do you prioritize multiple projects with competing deadlines?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
Follow-up
- What would you do differently if you ran that again?
- How did you know your change caused the improvement?
Discuss a time when you had to learn a new technology quickly to complete a project.
Discuss a time when you had to learn a new technology quickly to complete a project.
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 time when you had to work under tight deadlines. How did you manage it?
- 02
How do you handle conflicts within a team?
- 03
Can you provide an example of how you influenced a project’s direction?
- 04
What motivates you to excel in your work?
How difficult are the interviews, and how much preparation time is typical?
The interviews can range from average to difficult, depending on the specific technical questions asked. Candidates typically spend several weeks preparing, focusing on both technical skills and behavioral responses.
UNC Chapel Hill Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What differentiates successful candidates?
Successful candidates demonstrate a strong technical foundation, effective problem-solving skills, and an alignment with the university’s collaborative culture. They also showcase their ability to communicate complex ideas clearly.
UNC Chapel Hill Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What is the culture and working style at UNC Chapel Hill?
The culture at UNC Chapel Hill is collaborative and supportive, emphasizing teamwork, innovation, and a shared commitment to the university’s mission. Engineers are encouraged to contribute ideas and engage in ongoing learning.
UNC Chapel Hill Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What is the typical timeline from initial screen to offer?
The timeline can vary but generally ranges from a few weeks to a couple of months, depending on the number of candidates and scheduling availability.
UNC Chapel Hill Software Engineer candidate reports ↗Are there remote work or hybrid expectations?
While specific policies may vary by department, many positions allow for flexible work arrangements, including remote work options.
UNC Chapel Hill Software Engineer candidate reports ↗What topics does UNC Chapel Hill test in interviews?
UNC Chapel Hill interviews most often cover Data Analysis, Stakeholder Management, Time Management, Data-Driven Decision Making, and Stakeholder Communication. The exact emphasis depends on the specific role you apply for.
UNC Chapel Hill 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.
- 01UNC Chapel Hill 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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