Skip to contentSkip to footer

Software Engineer Staff Interview Questions

Salaries
Interviews

2,548 software engineer staff interview questions shared by candidates

We are working on a clone of Google Docs that allows users to collaborate on documents. Many users can work on the same document at the same time. We have 100 instances of our service running on 100 different machines. Each document needs to be managed exclusively by one instance while it is in use, but one instance can handle multiple documents at once. We have a simple load-balancing system. Because each document has a random numeric ID found in the URL, we use the value of (id % num_instances) to route traffic. For example, with 100 jobs, traffic for document #314814196 is routed to the instance with index 96. How will this system perform as the usage grows?
avatar

Staff Software Engineer

Interviewed at Wayfair

3★
Jul 23, 2024

We are working on a clone of Google Docs that allows users to collaborate on documents. Many users can work on the same document at the same time. We have 100 instances of our service running on 100 different machines. Each document needs to be managed exclusively by one instance while it is in use, but one instance can handle multiple documents at once. We have a simple load-balancing system. Because each document has a random numeric ID found in the URL, we use the value of (id % num_instances) to route traffic. For example, with 100 jobs, traffic for document #314814196 is routed to the instance with index 96. How will this system perform as the usage grows?

We are working on a clone of Facebook. We want to add a numeric count to every post showing how many friends the post" author has at the time of viewing the post, like this: Marie McWilliams (105 friends) I had a great day today, feeling good! Our database has two tables: USER 'user_id' (primary key) 'name' 'created_date' USER_RELATIONSHIP 'friendship_id' (primary key, unique to each relationship) 'user1_id' (indexed) 'user2_id' (indexed) 'start_date' Focusing on the database, how would you implement the friend-count feature? Note we will soon be more popular than Facebook, so the solution needs to scale.
avatar

Staff Software Engineer

Interviewed at Wayfair

3★
Jul 23, 2024

We are working on a clone of Facebook. We want to add a numeric count to every post showing how many friends the post" author has at the time of viewing the post, like this: Marie McWilliams (105 friends) I had a great day today, feeling good! Our database has two tables: USER 'user_id' (primary key) 'name' 'created_date' USER_RELATIONSHIP 'friendship_id' (primary key, unique to each relationship) 'user1_id' (indexed) 'user2_id' (indexed) 'start_date' Focusing on the database, how would you implement the friend-count feature? Note we will soon be more popular than Facebook, so the solution needs to scale.

1. Given two strings - find number of same character at same position and number of present character but at diffrenet position 2. Find highest sum of contiguous array elements for a given array. 3. print 1-100 using three threads, even using 1st, odd using second and a delemeter using 3rd
avatar

Staff Software Engineer

Interviewed at Demandbase

3.7★
Aug 28, 2023

1. Given two strings - find number of same character at same position and number of present character but at diffrenet position 2. Find highest sum of contiguous array elements for a given array. 3. print 1-100 using three threads, even using 1st, odd using second and a delemeter using 3rd

Viewing 231 - 240 interview questions

Glassdoor has 2,548 interview questions and reports from Software engineer staff interviews. Prepare for your interview. Get hired. Love your job.