Diagnose and plan
Take one coding mock, outline one design problem, and record two behavioral answers. Use the gaps—not a giant topic list—to build your plan.
Four-week preparation plan
How to prepare for a software engineering interview
Prepare the whole interview—not only LeetCode. This plan balances coding, system design, behavioral evidence, company research, and communication.
Build the foundations
Review core data structures and practice patterns: hashing, two pointers, sliding windows, trees, graphs, heaps, and binary search.
Practice interview conditions
Solve aloud with a timer, write tests before declaring done, and complete two system design walkthroughs from requirements to failure modes.
Make it company-specific
Study the role, choose eight relevant stories, practice the target company’s question style, and run two complete mock loops.
Readiness checklist
What “ready” looks like
Coding
You clarify the problem, explain a correct baseline, improve it, write clean code, and test edge cases aloud.
System design
You turn vague requirements into scale estimates, APIs, data models, components, and explicit trade-offs.
Behavioral
You have six to eight truthful stories with specific decisions, results, failures, and learning.
Company fit
You can explain why this role, connect your experience to it, and ask questions that show genuine research.