Software developer interview: how to prepare and common questions

A common process includes an initial conversation, technical interview, coding exercise and team or architecture stage.

Ask about the format in advance so you can focus your preparation.

Review data structures, complexity, concurrency, networking, databases, testing and fundamentals relevant to your stack.

Focus on concepts and when you would choose one approach over another.

Clarify the problem, ask about edge cases and explain your approach before writing code.

If you get stuck, verbalise assumptions and simplify the problem.

Senior interviews may cover APIs, data, scalability, queues, caching, observability and security.

Start with requirements and explain trade-offs.

Prepare examples about code review, technical disagreement, incidents, technical debt and mentoring.

Show how you balanced quality, time and other people's needs.

Junior roles focus more on foundations and learning; senior roles expect autonomy; tech leads add alignment and mentoring.

Choose stories with the scope expected at the target level.

Ask about architecture, deployment, testing, reviews, observability, ownership and how technical decisions are made.

These questions help you understand how the team actually works.