How to prepare for a technical interview as a software engineer

Ask the recruiter what the process looks like — most will tell you. Common rounds are a coding exercise (live or take-home), a system design or architecture discussion for mid-level and senior roles, a discussion of your past projects, and a behavioural interview about teamwork and decisions.

Practise in the language you will use in the interview and out loud, because explaining your thinking is part of what is assessed. Focus on common patterns — arrays and strings, hash maps, two pointers, recursion, trees and basic graphs — rather than memorising specific puzzles.

In the interview, clarify the problem first, talk through a simple solution before optimising, and test your code with a small example. A working, clearly explained solution beats a clever one you can't finish.

For design rounds, practise a repeatable structure: clarify requirements and scale, sketch the main components, discuss data storage, then go deeper on one or two parts and the trade-offs. Interviewers care more about your reasoning and trade-offs than about naming every technology.

Expect deep questions about anything on your resume. For your two or three most important projects, be ready to explain the problem, your role, the design, what went wrong and what you would change. If a skill is on your resume, assume you will be asked about it.

Prepare five or six short stories from your work — a difficult bug, a disagreement, a deadline, a mistake, something you led — and tell them with situation, action and result. The same story can answer several different questions.

Test your setup for online interviews, re-read the job description and your resume, prepare two or three questions about the team and the work, and rest. Being clear and calm helps more than one more practice problem at midnight.