Getting hired as a software engineer at Twitter is no easy feat With its massive user base and cutting-edge technology, Twitter only recruits the cream of the crop. Landing a job here means you’ve beaten out some incredibly tough competition
But you have to beat the dreaded software engineering interview before you can start writing code for one of the biggest social networks in the world.
I know – tech interviews can be intimidating. There’s so much you need to know and the stakes feel higher than ever.
Luckily I’m here to be your guide. I’ve compiled a list of the most common Twitter software engineering interview questions along with tips to help you craft winning answers.
You’ll know what to say and feel confident enough to ace your Twitter interview by the end. Let’s do this!.
Overview of the Twitter Software Engineer Interview Process
There are different ways that different companies hire people, but Twitter’s software engineering interviews usually go like this:
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Initial Phone Screen: 30-45 mins with a recruiter reviewing your resume and asking basic questions about your experience.
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Technical Phone Interview: 45-60 minute call focused on coding challenges and computer science fundamentals.
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On-site Interview: 4-6 rounds of 45-60 mins interviews on one day at a Twitter office. A mix of technical and behavioral questions from various engineering managers and team members.
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Technical Project: Occasionally candidates may be asked to complete a take-home coding challenge after the on-site.
Understanding this format helps you know what to expect and how to prepare accordingly. Now let’s get into the real meat – the questions!
Top Software Engineering Interview Questions at Twitter (With Sample Answers)
Below I’ve compiled 25 of the most common Twitter software engineer interview questions along with sample answers to help guide you in crafting strong responses.
Let’s get started!
Q1: Can you describe your experience with developing and maintaining large-scale distributed systems?
As a social network with millions of active users, Twitter operates on an enormous scale. They need software engineers who can build robust systems that are efficient, reliable and can handle huge amounts of traffic.
This question aims to assess your skills and track record in designing complex, distributed architectures. Here are some tips for a stellar answer:
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Highlight projects where you worked on large-scale distributed systems. Discuss specific tools/technologies used.
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Demonstrate you understand challenges like latency, throughput, scaling. Show how you overcame them.
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Emphasize skills like monitoring, observability, troubleshooting. These are key for distributed systems.
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Discuss your experience with cloud platforms like AWS that Twitter leverages for its infrastructure.
Here’s an example covering these key points:
“I have significant experience building large-scale distributed systems that need to handle high volumes of traffic and data. At my last company, I worked on migrating our monolithic app to a microservices architecture on AWS. This improved reliability and scalability dramatically. We used load balancing, horizontal scaling, and Docker containers to optimize each service. I also gained valuable experience with monitoring tools like Kibana and Zipkin for observability. We used these to promptly detect and debug issues before they caused major outages. I’m very comfortable coding complex distributed systems and highly available cloud architectures.”
Q2: How would you approach solving Twitter’s scalability issues, like during high-traffic events?
With millions of active users, scalability is paramount for Twitter. Sudden spikes in traffic during major events can cripple systems and platforms that aren’t designed to handle such loads.
This question tests your ability to think through real-world scaling challenges specific to Twitter’s business needs. Some tips:
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Demonstrate you understand bottlenecks like database transactions, limited bandwidth.
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Discuss solutions like caching, CDNs, asynchronous processing to optimize performance.
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Talk about horizontal scaling approaches using tools like Kubernetes and Docker.
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Highlight experience with scaling challenges at previous roles.
Here’s a sample answer:
“For Twitter’s scalability, I would leverage horizontal scaling through microservices and containers to efficiently handle sudden spikes in traffic. This allows rapidly spinning up new resources on demand. I would also implement comprehensive caching to reduce database load and accelerate response times for common requests during peak hours. A CDN can help absorb and distribute increased traffic as well. Finally, I would focus on an asynchronous architecture, using message queues and workers to take strain off the front-end. My experience building mobile apps has given me great experience optimizing performance and scaling to support millions of active users.”
Q3: What do you know about our API rules and how have you used APIs in the past?
As a platform built around integration with third-party apps, Twitter needs engineers well-versed in working with APIs. This question tests your general API knowledge and evaluates if you’ve reviewed Twitter’s specific API rules and limitations.
Some tips for an excellent answer:
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Demonstrate you’ve reviewed Twitter’s API docs and know basics like rate limits, authentication, endpoints.
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Discuss previous projects integrating APIs – how you handled rates limits, error handling, etc.
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Highlight experience working with social media or advertising APIs like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google if possible.
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Emphasize your understanding of secure API access and protecting user data.
Here’s a sample covering the key points:
“I’ve reviewed Twitter’s API documentation and am familiar with the rules like rate limits, OAuth for security, and endpoints for functionality like search and streaming. In my last role, I worked extensively with the YouTube API to build a video highlight tagging app. We handled rate limits by caching common requests and implementing exponential backoff for retries during spikes. I also have experience working with Facebook’s Graph API and Google’s Maps API. Overall, I’m very comfortable working with public REST APIs like Twitter’s while ensuring performance and security.”
Q4: How would you work on improving the user experience by reducing loading times and lagging?
Providing a smooth, seamless user experience is critical, especially for an interactive platform like Twitter. This question tests your understanding of web/mobile performance and ability to identify and resolve bottlenecks.
Some tips for an excellent answer:
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Demonstrate knowledge of performance optimization techniques like caching, lazy loading, compression, CDNs.
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Discuss experience diagnosing and profiling performance issues using tools like Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse.
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Highlight backend optimizations like database query tuning, indexing, server-side caching.
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Emphasize how you prioritize perceived performance just as much as measured speed.
Here’s a sample covering the key points:
“I would take a two-pronged approach to optimize Twitter’s performance – frontend and backend improvements. On the frontend, I would focus on perceived performance, like implementing skeleton screens so content loads incrementally. I would lazy load below-the-fold images and videos to accelerate initial load. Compressing assets, implementing service workers for caching, and migrating to a lightweight framework like React could also help. On the backend, I would analyze slow database queries and introduce indexing and caching to speed up reads for common requests. I would also explore a CDN for static content. My optimization efforts would be driven by user-centric performance metrics like Time-to-Interactive.”
Q5: Describe a time when you debugged a complex software issue. What steps did you take to resolve it?
Debugging is an inevitable part of a software engineer’s job. This question tests your systematic problem-solving abilities when faced with tricky bugs in large, complex codebases.
Follow these tips for an impressive answer:
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Set the context – describe the bug, its impact, the complexity of the codebase.
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Walk through the precise steps you took to diagnose the root cause.
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Highlight any creative debugging tactics you employed.
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Share any lessons you learned about writing maintainable, testable code.
Here’s a sample covering the key points:
“Recently our backend service for processing user uploads started timing out at peak traffic. This brought down the entire upload feature. The legacy codebase was complex with no tests or logging. I reproduced the bug consistently by mimicking peak traffic patterns. I added more verbose logging to narrow down the faulty component. This pointed to a non-performant SQL query in our upload handler. Rewriting the query using proper indexing solved the timeout issue. Going forward, I implemented unit tests and standardized our logging to prevent issues being so hard to diagnose again.”
Q6: Do you have experience with algorithms for content ranking and personalization?
Twitter’s main feed relies heavily on algorithms to curate and rank content specific to each user’s interests. This question aims to gauge your skills in this area.
Some tips for an impressive answer:
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Highlight any experience with recommendation systems and machine learning techniques like collaborative filtering.
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Demonstrate you understand the factors involved in ranking like engagement, user interests, timeliness of content.
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Discuss how you have worked on personalizing mobile notification experiences. Twitter relies
The role of a Twitter Software Engineer
Twitter is an American social networking and microblogging site where people post and respond to messages called “tweets.” In 2021, 353 million people used Twitter every day, making it one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
As an internet technology company, Twitter depends on its software engineers to keep making the platform better so that users have a better experience and are happy with it.
Role and responsibility
- Work cross-functionally with committed teammates to build features on twitter.com.
- You will need to know a lot about modern web frameworks and APIs, like React, Redux, React Router, GraphQL, and Webpack, in order to create solutions for media playback and conversational mechanics that work on all devices and platforms. This is a unique challenge in web development.
- Take part in design and code reviews to build strong skills and best practices within and outside the team.
- Take an active role in team processes, and product decisions. You’ll be asked to do more than just write code. For example, you’ll use data and user feedback to help set priorities, and you’ll be responsible for a feature from start to finish.
- Take part in our culture of learning by taking advantage of chances to learn from Twitter’s community of web engineers, designers, and product managers and by showing us what you’re good at.
Skills/qualifications required
- B. S. or higher in computer science, or 4 years of work experience in a related field
- Very good at building websites and very familiar with new web frameworks and APIs, like React and Redux.
- Experience in designing and building customer facing Progressive Web App(s)
- Having worked as a tech lead or architect before and been able to set the team’s technical direction
- Worked in teams with people from different departments, such as product management, design, and infrastructure
- Experience in designing and delivering reliable, efficient software and systems.
Twitter Software Engineer salary
- Entry-level salary : USD 191,000
- Senior positions : USD 719,000.
- Salary range: USD 253,000, with USD 164,000 in base pay, USD 64,000 in stock pay, and USD 25,000 in bonus pay.
Twitter Software Engineer Interview Guide
There are three parts to the Twitter Software Engineer interview process: the phone screen, the technical screen, and the in-person round.
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The Phone screen is a 45-minute telephonic interview with the recruiter. Here, the recruiter asks questions related to your CV and work experience, if any. The main goal of this exercise is to see how motivated the candidate is for the job and to see if he or she is a good fit for the company and the job. People who are just out of college should be very careful with their CV and any projects or internships they may have had while they were there.
Most asked interview questions in the Initial Screen.
- What made you decide to become a software engineer?
- Why Twitter?
The technical screen is a one-hour interview with the hiring manager and a Twitter software engineer. This round is aimed at assessing your technical skills in the following areas:
Coding
There will be questions on the technical screen that test the candidate’s general programming skills in the “coding aptitude” section. The focus will primarily be on object-oriented programming. Students need to be proficient in at least one of the programming languages among C++, Java, and Python. Typically, the interviewer asks 2-3 coding questions that need to be attempted through a shared online code editor.
System Design
Systems design includes things like system architecture, product design, modules, interfaces, and data that a system needs to meet certain needs. Organizations like Twitter are looking for people who are good at system design to help them solve real problems by putting what they know to use. The interviewer may ask questions on front-end design, back-end design, scalability, and more in this section.
Most commonly asked Coding questions in the Technical screen:
- Give a list of integers as input, and make a new list where each item at index i is the product of all the numbers in the first list except the one at i.
- If you are given an array a[] and a number p, you need to write a function that counts how many times p appears in a[].
- Here’s the code to add an item to the middle of a linked list:
- You can turn a sorted list into a binary search tree by writing a function.
Most commonly asked System Design questions
- You have n threads, and each one will send out a message or object that has properties, one of which is the timestamp. Now you need to handle the message based on the time it arrived. How would you design this system?.
- Design the Redbus payment system.
- Design a recommendation system.
- Create a system that can receive a lot of data, like readings from electricity meters, in a certain format and then combine it. Different tenants send this information in any format and through any method, such as HTTP, FTP, and more.
- Can you design a movie ticket reservation system?
- Tell me how you would make a chat app like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
- Tell me how you would handle versioning of Web Services APIs.
- When would you want two systems to talk to each other without being at the same time?
Twitter system design mock interview (with Senior Software Engineer)
FAQ
Is it hard to get a job at Twitter?
How long is a twitter interview?
What are behavioral interview questions?
What is a phone screen for a job?
What questions are asked in a software engineer interview?
We’ve got the answers to your most frequently asked questions. What Questions Will Be Asked in a Software Engineer Interview? Three main types of questions come up in software engineering interviews: conceptual/technical questions, culture/behavioral interview questions, and coding skills tests.
What is a senior software engineer interview question?
Senior software engineer interview questions often aim to discover what you’ve learned from your experiences and how you may use that to add value to the company. This question helps your interviewer learn how you use technology to meet organizational challenges. Feel free to talk about: The high-level objective the project addressed.
How to prepare for software engineering interviews?
Interviewing well is a skill that you can develop with some practice. Here are a few pointers that can help you prepare for software engineering interviews. You should always start your preparation for job interviews with research about the company and the role. Begin by reading the job description thoroughly.
What makes a good software engineer interview?
These answers lack passion and focus, and they don’t set you apart from the other candidates. Instead, opt to talk about problems you enjoy solving, either for a company or larger, global issues, as well as what success as a software engineer means to you on a personal level.
