IBM
Global technology and consulting firm with deep roots in enterprise IT and AI.
3 Rounds
~14 Days
Medium
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
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available hybrid cloud storage service that synchronizes on-premise enterprise data with IBM Cloud Object Storage.
#Hybrid Cloud
#Data Synchronization
#High Availability
#Storage
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a distributed rate limiter for an enterprise API gateway to prevent abuse and enforce client-specific quotas.
#Rate Limiting
#API Gateway
#Redis
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable log aggregation system (similar to Splunk or the ELK stack) that can ingest, index, and query terabytes of logs daily from thousands of IBM microservices.
#Log Aggregation
#Kafka
#Elasticsearch
#Big Data
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a real-time AI inference pipeline that takes user text, processes it via Watson NLP models, and returns sentiment analysis to a web client.
#AI/ML Pipelines
#WebSockets
#Microservices
#Load Balancing
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed message queue system similar to Apache Kafka or IBM MQ.
#Distributed Systems
#Message Queue
#Storage
#Concurrency
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
easy
Design a URL shortener service like Bitly.
#Hashing
#Database
#Caching
#Load Balancing
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.