IBM

Global technology and consulting firm with deep roots in enterprise IT and AI.

3 Rounds ~14 Days Medium

Start Mock Interview

The Interview Loop

Recruiter Screen (30 min)

Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.

Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)

Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.

Interview Question Bank

All Roles Backend Engineer 35 Cloud Engineer 35 Data Engineer 35 Data Scientist 35 DevOps Engineer 35 Frontend Engineer 35 Full Stack Engineer 35 Machine Learning Engineer 35 Product Manager 35 Software Engineer 35

All Topics Algorithms 10 System Design 5 Culture Fit 5 Frontend 5 Backend 4 DevOps 3 Databases 1 Architecture 1

Full Stack Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you had to adapt to a significant change in project requirements late in the development cycle.

#Adaptability #Agile #Communication

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Describe a situation where you disagreed with a senior engineer or architect's technical decision. How did you handle it?

#Conflict Resolution #Communication #Leadership

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Behavioral • medium

One of IBM's core values is 'Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.' Can you share an example of how you embodied this in a past project?

#Core Values #Accountability #Teamwork

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you delivered a technical solution that directly impacted client success or improved a business metric.

#Client Success #Impact #Problem Solving

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Behavioral • easy

Describe a time you had to learn a new technology or framework very quickly to meet a project deadline.

#Continuous Learning #Time Management #Initiative

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • easy

Write a function to determine if a string containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']' is valid.

#Strings #Stack

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • medium

Find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

#Strings #Sliding Window #Hash Set

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • medium

Given an array of strings, group the anagrams together. You can return the answer in any order.

#Arrays #Hash Table #Sorting

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • easy

Given an array of integers and an integer target, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to target. Optimize for time complexity.

#Arrays #Hash Table

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • hard

Given n non-negative integers representing an elevation map where the width of each bar is 1, compute how much water it can trap after raining.

#Arrays #Two Pointers #Dynamic Programming

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • easy

Reverse a singly linked list. Provide both iterative and recursive solutions.

#Linked Lists #Recursion

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • medium

Find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes in a binary tree.

#Trees #Depth-First Search #Recursion

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • medium

Given an m x n 2D binary grid which represents a map of '1's (land) and '0's (water), return the number of islands.

#Graphs #Depth-First Search #Breadth-First Search

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • medium

Return a deep copy (clone) of a connected undirected graph.

#Graphs #Hash Table #Depth-First Search

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • hard

Given two words, beginWord and endWord, and a dictionary wordList, return the number of words in the shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord.

#Graphs #Breadth-First Search

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a custom React hook (e.g., useFetch) that handles data fetching, loading state, and error handling.

#React #Hooks #JavaScript

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Coding • easy

Write a SQL query to find the second highest salary from an Employee table.

#Databases #SQL

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • System Design • medium

Design a URL Shortener service (like bit.ly). Focus on the API design and database schema.

#Scalability #API Design #Databases

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • System Design • hard

Design an enterprise chat application similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

#WebSockets #Microservices #Databases #Real-time

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a highly available log aggregation service for IBM Cloud that ingests logs from thousands of microservices.

#Distributed Systems #Kafka #Elasticsearch #Scalability

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • System Design • medium

Design a rate limiter for a public-facing API to prevent abuse.

#Algorithms #Redis #API Design

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • System Design • hard

How would you design a distributed cache system?

#Caching #Distributed Systems #Consistent Hashing

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the Virtual DOM in React and how the reconciliation process works.

#React #Architecture #Performance

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you manage state in a large-scale React enterprise application?

#React #State Management #Redux #Context API

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • easy

Explain event delegation in JavaScript and why it is useful.

#JavaScript #DOM #Events

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • hard

We have an internal IBM dashboard displaying thousands of server logs. How would you optimize the rendering of this large list in React?

#React #Performance #Virtualization

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the Spring Bean lifecycle and the different bean scopes available in Spring Boot.

#Java #Spring Boot #Architecture

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you handle transaction management in a Spring Boot application, specifically when dealing with multiple database operations?

#Java #Spring Boot #Databases #Transactions

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the Node.js event loop and how it handles asynchronous operations despite being single-threaded.

#Node.js #Architecture #Asynchronous Programming

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

How would you implement JWT-based authentication in a RESTful API? Discuss security considerations.

#Security #Authentication #REST API

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

What are the key differences between a monolithic architecture and microservices? When would you choose one over the other?

#Microservices #System Design #Scalability

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes in a relational database like DB2 or PostgreSQL.

#Databases #Performance #Indexing

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

Walk me through how you would containerize a Full Stack application (Node.js backend, React frontend) using Docker.

#Docker #Containers #Deployment

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • medium

In the context of OpenShift or Kubernetes, explain the difference between a Pod and a Deployment.

#Kubernetes #OpenShift #Cloud

Practice

Full Stack Engineer • Technical • hard

How do you handle database schema migrations in an automated CI/CD pipeline without causing downtime?

#CI/CD #Databases #Zero Downtime

Practice

Difficulty Radar

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Meet Your Interviewers

The "Standard" Interviewer

Senior Engineer

Focuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.

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Unwritten Rules

Think Out Loud

Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.

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