Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Questions
Senior+ software engineer loops (E5/L5 and above) shift the center of gravity away from raw coding and toward system design and leadership. These questions were reported by candidates interviewing for senior+ SWE roles across top tech companies, so they reflect the real senior+ bar: open-ended design rounds where you're expected to drive the architecture and defend trade-offs, behavioral rounds that probe scope, ambiguity, and leading without authority, and a coding bar that stays high but matters less than how you reason about scale. There are 150+ real, recently reported senior+ SWE questions here, spanning coding, system design, and behavioral rounds. Most come with a detailed model answer, so you can see not just whether a senior+ response is correct but whether it operates at the right altitude.
"I got asked a hardcore MCM DP question and I saw it on PracHub as well. Solved that question in 5 minutes. Without PracHub I doubt I could solve it in 5 hours. Though somehow didn't get hired, perhaps I guess I solved it too fast? /s"
"Believe me i'm a student here jn US. Recently interviewed for MSFT. They asked me exact question from PracHub. I saw it the night before and ignored it cause why waste time on random sites. I legit wanna go back and redo this whole thing if I had chance. Not saying will work for everyone but there is certainly some merit to that website. And i'm gonna use it in future prep from now on like lc tagged"
"10 years of experience but never worked at a top company. PracHub's senior-level questions helped me break into FAANG at 35. Age is just a number."
"I was skeptical about the 'real questions' claim, so I put it to the test. I searched for the exact question I got grilled on at my last Meta onsite... and it was right there. Word for word."
"Got a Google recruiter call on Monday, interview on Friday. Crammed PracHub for 4 days. Passed every round. This platform is a miracle worker."
"I've used LC, Glassdoor, and random Discords. Nothing comes close to the accuracy here. The questions are actually current — that's what got me. Felt like I had a cheat sheet during the interview."
"The solution quality is insane. It covers approach, edge cases, time complexity, follow-ups. Nothing else comes close."
"Legit the only resource you need. TC went from 180k -> 350k. Just memorize the top 50 for your target company and you're golden."
"PracHub Premium for one month cost me the price of two coffees a week. It landed me a $280K+ starting offer."
"Literally just signed a $600k offer. I only had 2 weeks to prep, so I focused entirely on the company-tagged lists here. If you're targeting L5+, don't overthink it."
"Coaches and bootcamp prep courses cost around $200-300 but PracHub Premium is actually less than a Netflix subscription. And it landed me a $178K offer."
"I honestly don't know how you guys gather so many real interview questions. It's almost scary. I walked into my Amazon loop and recognized 3 out of 4 problems from your database."
"Discovered PracHub 10 days before my interview. By day 5, I stopped being nervous. By interview day, I was actually excited to show what I knew."
"I recently cleared Uber interviews (strong hire in the design round) and all the questions were present in prachub."
"The search is what sold me. I typed in a really niche DP problem I got asked last year and it actually came up, full breakdown and everything. These guys are clearly updating it constantly."
Explain a Challenging Project, Influence, and Mentorship
Build a coherent behavioral interview narrative spanning a challenging technical project, influence without authority, and mentorship. Clarify your ow...
Design a Local Leader Election System
This question evaluates distributed systems skills—specifically leader election, failure detection, state propagation, and the ability to design and i...
Design a Resilient Document Aggregation Service
Design a Resilient Document Aggregation Service Your team owns a backend service that assembles a "document bundle" for clients. To build one bundle, ...
Group Strings By Anagram Signature
Given a list of strings, group the strings so that each group contains words that are anagrams of each other. Discuss both a sorting-based signature a...
Design camera-footage upload with custody chain
System design prompt You’re building a backend service for uploading recorded body-camera / dashcam footage from client devices (often on unreliable n...
Design Food Ratings and Driver Payouts
Design the backend for a food-delivery product (think DoorDash-style marketplace). The system has two distinct surfaces that you must address together...
Design a Metrics Ingestion Pipeline
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a large-scale distributed system for ingesting time-series metrics at high throughput. It test...
Design Ad Frequency and Order Tracking
This question evaluates system-design competencies for building low-latency, high-throughput ad-platform components—specifically a real-time frequency...
Externally Sort a 500 GB CSV by One Column with 16 GB of RAM
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design an external merge sort for data far larger than available memory, a core systems design skill....
Design streaming error-log counting with moving average
Design a core component in a streaming system: Input: - Multiple upstream services continuously emit log events. - Each event includes at least: servi...
Scale a Distributed Randomized Multiset
After designing the randomized multiset on a single machine, explain how you would scale it across multiple servers. The distributed system should sup...
Build Resilient Aggregation and Debug Routing
This onsite combined two software-engineering exercises: 1. Implement a service method that calls multiple mock downstream APIs, merges their response...
How do you conduct a code review exercise?
In a live interview, you are shown a short code change — a diff, a pull request, or a standalone function — and asked to produce written code review c...
Design Publisher Configuration Rules
Design a supply-side advertising configuration system that manages publisher-specific rules. A publisher may own many websites, mobile apps, channels,...
Design Top-K, Crawler, and Chess Systems
This question evaluates system-design competency across scalable distributed services, covering real-time streaming Top-K aggregation, large-scale dis...
Discuss a Difficult Project and Your Next-Role Goals
Prepare a manager interview response covering a difficult project and what you want from your next role. Connect real technical evidence, ownership, t...
Driving a Project Forward Despite Internal Opposition
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to drive initiatives and influence others without formal authority, a core competency in behavioral and ...
Describe Using AI at Work
This question evaluates AI literacy, communication of technical impact, ethical judgment about safeguards, and the ability to quantify business or eng...
Explain How You Would Test a System
Explain how to test a system by first defining its contract, invariants, risks, and trustworthy oracles. Build a layered strategy spanning unit, prope...
Review and Improve a Flawed Design Document
Review and Improve a Flawed Design Document You are given a design document for a system that has important omissions or unsafe assumptions. Review it...