PwC

PricewaterhouseCoopers, a multinational professional services network.

4 Rounds ~21 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 System Design 8 Algorithms 8 SQL 2 Databases 2 Communication 1 Teamwork 1 Version Control 1 Testing 1

Software Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you had to explain a complex technical architecture to a non-technical client or stakeholder.

#Client Facing #Soft Skills

Practice

Software Engineer • Behavioral • medium

How do you handle a situation where a client changes the project requirements drastically just weeks before the delivery deadline?

#Agile #Conflict Resolution #Adaptability

Practice

Software Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you noticed a security vulnerability or compliance issue in a project. How did you address it?

#Security #Integrity #Leadership

Practice

Software Engineer • Behavioral • easy

Why do you want to work as a Software Engineer at PwC rather than a traditional tech company?

#Motivation #Career Goals

Practice

Software Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you had to learn a completely new technology stack quickly to deliver a project.

#Continuous Learning #Problem Solving

Practice

Software Engineer • Behavioral • medium

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior engineer or a manager on a technical decision. How did you resolve it?

#Conflict Resolution #Communication

Practice

Software Engineer • Behavioral • easy

Tell me about a time you had multiple competing deadlines. How did you prioritize your work?

#Prioritization #Delivery

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • medium

Given a list of overlapping tax reporting periods represented as intervals, write a function to merge all overlapping intervals.

#Arrays #Sorting

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a SQL query to find the top 3 departments with the highest average transaction volume over the last quarter.

#Aggregations #Joins #Window Functions

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • easy

Given an array of transaction amounts, find two transactions that sum up to a specific flagged fraudulent amount.

#Arrays #Hash Maps

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • easy

Write a function to validate if a string containing a mathematical formula (with parentheses, brackets, and braces) is properly balanced.

#Strings #Stacks

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • hard

Given a list of project tasks with dependencies, determine if it is possible to finish all tasks (detect if there is a cycle).

#Graphs #Topological Sort #DFS

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a program to group an array of transaction descriptions into anagrams to identify potentially duplicated or obfuscated entries.

#Strings #Hash Maps

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • medium

Given an organizational hierarchy represented as a binary tree, find the lowest common manager (Lowest Common Ancestor) of two employees.

#Trees #Recursion

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • medium

Write a SQL query to find the Nth highest salary from an Employee table. How would you optimize it for a table with millions of rows?

#Subqueries #Performance

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • medium

Given a string, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.

#Strings #Sliding Window

Practice

Software Engineer • Coding • medium

You are given an array of integers representing coin denominations and a total amount. Write a function to compute the fewest number of coins needed to make up that amount.

#Dynamic Programming

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • medium

Design an Audit Logging System that can handle high throughput from various internal microservices and ensure data immutability.

#Microservices #Message Queues #Database Design

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a secure, large-scale document ingestion pipeline for processing millions of client tax forms and invoices.

#Cloud Architecture #Data Pipelines #Security

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • medium

Design a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system for a global enterprise portal used by PwC employees and external clients.

#Security #Database Schema #API Design

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • medium

Design an internal employee directory and skill-matching platform for PwC consultants to find subject matter experts.

#Search #Databases #Caching

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • hard

Design a real-time fraud detection system that analyzes streams of financial transactions.

#Stream Processing #Machine Learning Integration #Low Latency

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • medium

Design an API rate limiter to prevent clients from overwhelming our internal tax calculation service.

#API Gateway #Caching #Algorithms

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • medium

Design a secure file transfer service for clients to upload sensitive financial documents (up to 5GB per file).

#Storage #Networking #Security

Practice

Software Engineer • System Design • easy

Design a URL shortener service (like bit.ly) to be used internally for sharing links to PwC audit reports.

#Hashing #Databases #API Design

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain the SOLID principles and provide an example of how you applied the Dependency Inversion Principle in a recent project.

#OOP #Design Patterns #Clean Code

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • medium

What is the difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes in a relational database?

#SQL #Performance Tuning #Indexing

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • medium

Describe your ideal CI/CD pipeline for deploying a containerized microservice to a cloud environment.

#CI/CD #Docker #Cloud

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you secure a REST API exposed to external clients?

#REST #Authentication #Authorization

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • hard

Explain how you would handle race conditions in a highly concurrent application processing financial transactions.

#Multithreading #Locks #Transactions

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • easy

What is the difference between Git Merge and Git Rebase? When would you use one over the other?

#Git #Collaboration

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • medium

How do you approach writing unit tests for a legacy codebase that has tight coupling and no existing tests?

#Unit Testing #Refactoring #Mocking

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • hard

Explain the concept of Micro-frontends. Have you ever used them, and what are the pros and cons?

#Web Development #Architecture

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • medium

What is an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper)? What is the 'N+1 query problem' and how do you solve it?

#ORM #Performance #SQL

Practice

Software Engineer • Technical • medium

Explain how Redis works. What are some common use cases for Redis in an enterprise web application?

#Redis #In-Memory Data Stores #Performance

Practice

Difficulty Radar

Based on recent AI-sourced data.

Meet Your Interviewers

The "Standard" Interviewer

Senior Engineer

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

Simulate

Unwritten Rules

Think Out Loud

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

Practice Now