Engineer Interviews

Engineer Interview Questions

Engineers are responsible for designing and building products. In an interview context, expect to be quizzed on your technical skills, and also evaluated for your ability to work as a part of a team to get things built. The specific questions you are asked will depend on what type of engineering position you are looking for such as a specific engineering discipline like software engineer, electrical engineer, or mechanical engineer.

Top Engineer Interview Questions & How to Answer

Question 1

Question #1: What is the most challenging engineering project you've dealt with, and how did you ensure it was successful?

How to answer
How to answer: This question requires you to give a specific example. Ideally, you're able to choose a project that mirrors the type of work you'd do in the role you're interviewing for. Even if it's not your most challenging project, make sure you describe your obstacle(s) and the successful outcome clearly and enthusiastically.
Question 2

Question #2: In your current role, what steps do you take to avoid making mistakes?

How to answer
How to answer: Whether you have a formal process or not, list any specific measures you employ (i.e., digital tools, consulting with colleagues, etc.). Make sure your answer demonstrates a commitment to quality control, efficiency, and safety.
Question 3

Question #3: Describe a time you dealt with a difficult client or stakeholder.

How to answer
How to answer: This one also requires a specific example that demonstrates patience and good judgment. An employer is looking for evidence that you're able to confidently and calmly stand by your decisions. Share an example with a positive outcome.

842,048 engineer interview questions shared by candidates

You're writing an application that receives a stream of individual items of data. The stream may be very long or very short, but you have no way of knowing how long it is (i.e. there's no trick to figuring out the size of the stream of data). How would you go about choosing m items such that any subset of m items was equally likely? (Not an even distribution of values, but just that any m items are equally likely to be chosen). So for example, m=1000, and the number of items in the stream, n, may be 1000, or 10000, or 100000000, or much much larger; there is no way to know how many.
avatar

Software Engineer

Interviewed at Google

4.4
Feb 4, 2010

You're writing an application that receives a stream of individual items of data. The stream may be very long or very short, but you have no way of knowing how long it is (i.e. there's no trick to figuring out the size of the stream of data). How would you go about choosing m items such that any subset of m items was equally likely? (Not an even distribution of values, but just that any m items are equally likely to be chosen). So for example, m=1000, and the number of items in the stream, n, may be 1000, or 10000, or 100000000, or much much larger; there is no way to know how many.

trickier question, code a method given the following method signature that will print out any numbers that intersect both arrays of numbers //Example arrays // 4, 18, 25, 40, 411 // 20, 25, 40, 320, 1009, 1100 void intersect(int[] arr1, int len1, int[] arr2, int len2) {
avatar

Software Engineer

Interviewed at Google

4.4
Mar 8, 2010

trickier question, code a method given the following method signature that will print out any numbers that intersect both arrays of numbers //Example arrays // 4, 18, 25, 40, 411 // 20, 25, 40, 320, 1009, 1100 void intersect(int[] arr1, int len1, int[] arr2, int len2) {

Second interview: 1) A shuffled set contains unique numbers except one of the numbers appears twice. Find the number that appears twice. (Funny enough the interviewer had a custom random shuffler function to shuffle the set. But his shuffler function was not truly random as he would randomly pick indexes from 0--length of set and swap but this could pick the same indexes twice. Its technically buggy code, but I didn't dare mention something like that in an interview. Goes to show how "strong" the developers working in Tinder are. It also explains the numerous buggy user experience on the app) 2) Merge part in merge sort
avatar

Software Engineer

Interviewed at Tinder

3.5
Oct 17, 2017

Second interview: 1) A shuffled set contains unique numbers except one of the numbers appears twice. Find the number that appears twice. (Funny enough the interviewer had a custom random shuffler function to shuffle the set. But his shuffler function was not truly random as he would randomly pick indexes from 0--length of set and swap but this could pick the same indexes twice. Its technically buggy code, but I didn't dare mention something like that in an interview. Goes to show how "strong" the developers working in Tinder are. It also explains the numerous buggy user experience on the app) 2) Merge part in merge sort

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