Principal Software Engineer Interview Questions

2,161 principal software engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Q1) Medium and Hard level Coding questions which covers data structure & algorithms. Hashmap, tree, linked list, etc. Q2) Architecture and Design for a specific large scale application which can handle X millions requests per seconds. Q3) Leadership and Managerial questions on mentoring, customer focus, conflict resolution & convincing skills with example.
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Principal Software Engineer

Interviewed at Salesforce

4
May 15, 2019

Q1) Medium and Hard level Coding questions which covers data structure & algorithms. Hashmap, tree, linked list, etc. Q2) Architecture and Design for a specific large scale application which can handle X millions requests per seconds. Q3) Leadership and Managerial questions on mentoring, customer focus, conflict resolution & convincing skills with example.

The 3rd-panel interview was the worst. The interviewer was with zscaler for 15 years. He was traveling to India, so I had to schedule an early morning interview. His attitude was worse. HE was talking to me like, everything I wrote in my resume was fake. The conversation did not begin with a tone where he genuinely wanted to know what I know, instead he was trying to have his gotcha moment! Grow up ppl. A deep dive into projects again and a java question. Get top N transactions of a particular type. Write methods to ingest transactions and get transactions. The returned transaction would have details if the txn is elible for rewards. good question,
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Principal Software Engineer

Interviewed at Zscaler

3.5
Jun 13, 2024

The 3rd-panel interview was the worst. The interviewer was with zscaler for 15 years. He was traveling to India, so I had to schedule an early morning interview. His attitude was worse. HE was talking to me like, everything I wrote in my resume was fake. The conversation did not begin with a tone where he genuinely wanted to know what I know, instead he was trying to have his gotcha moment! Grow up ppl. A deep dive into projects again and a java question. Get top N transactions of a particular type. Write methods to ingest transactions and get transactions. The returned transaction would have details if the txn is elible for rewards. good question,

Again some more details about projects, more of a deep dive into projects. The interviewer was from India, so I had to schedule a late-night interview. The interviewer was with the company for about 12 years, so he was showing some attitude initially, once I explained about the complexity of my projects and showcased my level of understanding about the problems I was working with, he was eased a bit and talked to me nice. The interviewer also asked me to code in Java just to understand my level of comfort in Java, The question was to write a decision-maker routine that would determine if the service has to route the request to cache or to the db.
avatar

Principal Software Engineer

Interviewed at Zscaler

3.5
Jun 13, 2024

Again some more details about projects, more of a deep dive into projects. The interviewer was from India, so I had to schedule a late-night interview. The interviewer was with the company for about 12 years, so he was showing some attitude initially, once I explained about the complexity of my projects and showcased my level of understanding about the problems I was working with, he was eased a bit and talked to me nice. The interviewer also asked me to code in Java just to understand my level of comfort in Java, The question was to write a decision-maker routine that would determine if the service has to route the request to cache or to the db.

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