Software engineering interviews mix behavioural questions with system design and debugging. Interviewers want evidence that you can ship reliable code, reason about trade-offs, and work well in a team. Below are the questions you're most likely to face and what a strong answer shows. When you're ready, rehearse them in the Interview Lab with questions built from your job ad.
What they're looking for
Clear architecture, explicit trade-offs (consistency vs latency, build vs buy), and what you would change now.
What they're looking for
Calm triage, root-cause analysis, communication during the incident, and follow-up fixes that prevent it happening again.
What they're looking for
Testing strategy, code review habits, naming and documentation, and refactoring with intent.
What they're looking for
Disagreeing with data, respecting the final decision, and the outcome.
What they're looking for
Requirements first, then storage and ID generation, caching, scaling reads, and failure modes.
What they're looking for
Curiosity, plus the gap between learning something and actually using it.
Most candidates know the questions and still freeze on the day. In the Interview Lab, an AI hiring manager asks questions written from the real job ad and your CV. You answer by voice or text and get a scored report with a stronger version of every answer.
Start with a free match checkStudy the job ad, prepare STAR stories for the competencies it lists, rehearse answers out loud, and do a mock interview. The Interview Lab generates software engineer questions from the actual ad and scores your answers.
Roughly 1 to 2 minutes for behavioural questions. Technical questions can run longer if you walk through your reasoning.