and Huntington Software Engineer Interview Guide

The 60-second brief

As a Software Engineer at and Huntington, you are at the forefront of building the digital foundation that powers a premier regional banking experience. This role—often aligned internally as a Programmer/Analyst 2—is critical to ensuring that millions of customers and internal stakeholders have access to secure, reliable, and highly performant financial systems. You are not just writing code; you are engineering trust. The impact of this position resonates across multiple product lines, from consumer-facing mobile applications to complex backend transaction processing systems. You will be tasked with solving high-stakes technical challenges where accuracy, security, and scalability are non-negotiable. Because the financial sector operates under strict regulatory and operational demands, your work directly influences the bank's ability to innovate while maintaining rock-solid stability.

This guide is scoped to a Software Engineer candidate at and Huntington.

Focus areas

• Behavioral Interviewing
• Technical Interviewing
• Resume & Project Explanation

The and Huntington interview process

and Huntington candidates report 4 rounds over 3-5 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

Phone Screen

Initial 30-minute conversation with a recruiter or HR representative focusing on background and behavioral alignment.

What to demonstrate

• Initial 30-minute conversation with a recruiter or HR representative focusing on background and behavioral alignment
• Depth in Behavioral Interviewing

How to prepare

• Be able to walk your CV end to end in two minutes, and say why this company specifically.
• Have your salary expectations, notice period and location constraints ready, and ask for the rest of the loop in writing.

Core Interview Stages

Combination of technical and behavioral rounds, which may include a panel interview or back-to-back sessions with engineering managers.

What to demonstrate

• Combination of technical and behavioral rounds, which may include a panel interview or back-to-back sessions with engineering managers
• Depth in Behavioral Interviewing

How to prepare

• Answer aloud and timed: Explain how you handled data persistence and storage in your previous application.
• Answer aloud and timed: If you had to scale the project you just described to handle 10x the traffic, what architectural changes would you make?

Technical Assessment

Deep dive into technical skills, including live coding challenges and discussions on past projects and architectural decisions.

What to demonstrate

• Deep dive into technical skills
• Including live coding challenges and discussions on past projects and architectural decisions

How to prepare

• Answer aloud and timed: Describe a time you had to migrate or integrate a legacy system with modern technology.
• Answer aloud and timed: Write a function to solve [specific algorithmic challenge] using Coderpad.

Cultural Fit Discussion

Evaluation of communication skills and alignment with the company culture, allowing candidates to ask questions about the team.

What to demonstrate

• Evaluation of communication skills and alignment with the company culture, allowing candidates to ask questions about the team
• Depth in Behavioral Interviewing

How to prepare

• Answer aloud and timed: Explain how garbage collection works in your primary programming language.
• Answer aloud and timed: Can you break down this concept right down to the bits and bytes? How is memory allocated here?

Where candidates lose points

Clarify the Agenda Early

Because communication from third-party recruiters can sometimes lack detail, politely ask the hiring manager at the start of the call what the structure of the interview will be. This prevents surprises like unexpected coding challenges.

Defend Your Resume Confidently

Interviewers will probe your past projects deeply. Do not list technologies you cannot discuss at an architectural level. Practice explaining your technical choices clearly and concisely.

Handle Interpersonal Curveballs Gracefully

You may encounter interviewers who are abrupt or who take unexpected phone calls during your session. Maintain your professionalism, stay composed, and continue to provide strong, focused answers.

Bridge Technology Gaps

If an interviewer dismisses your experience with a specific tool (e.g., calling Firebase "just storage"), calmly and professionally explain the broader capabilities of the tool and how those concepts directly map to the technologies they use at and Huntington.

Questions & practice

Write a function to solve [specific algorithmic challenge] using Coderpad.

Medium · Core Technical and Coding Concepts

Approach

1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

• How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
• What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

Explain how garbage collection works in your primary programming language.

Medium · Core Technical and Coding Concepts

Approach

1. Say what the runtime actually does before reasoning about the code.
2. Name what is shared across threads and what owns each piece of state.
3. Identify the window where an invariant is briefly untrue.
4. Distinguish a value from a reference to it, and say which one you handed out.

Follow-up

• What happens if two callers reach this at the same time?
• Where could this allocate more than you expect?

Can you break down this concept right down to the bits and bytes? How is memory allocated here?

Medium · Core Technical and Coding Concepts

Approach

1. Say what the runtime actually does before reasoning about the code.
2. Name what is shared across threads and what owns each piece of state.
3. Identify the window where an invariant is briefly untrue.
4. Distinguish a value from a reference to it, and say which one you handed out.

Follow-up

• What happens if two callers reach this at the same time?
• Where could this allocate more than you expect?

What is the time and space complexity of the code you just wrote, and how can it be optimized?

Medium · Core Technical and Coding Concepts

Approach

1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

• How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
• What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

Explain the difference between overriding and overloading, and provide a use case for each.

Medium · Core Technical and Coding Concepts

Approach

1. Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
2. Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
3. Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
4. State the target complexity and say which constraint rules the naive version out.

Follow-up

• How does this change if the input no longer fits in memory?
• What is the worst case, and how likely is it on real data?

Keep soft-deleted accounts from blocking re-registration

Easy · soft delete · unique constraints · engine differences

app_user holds user_id, tenant_id, email CITEXT, password_hash (NULL for SSO principals), email_verified_at, auth_version, status ('invited','active','suspended','deactivated'), created_at, updated_at, deleted_at. Two live accounts for one address inside a tenant must be impossible, but an address freed by a soft delete must be reusable, and the same tenant may delete and re-register it repeatedly. Write the uniqueness DDL for PostgreSQL 16, then the equivalent for MySQL 8 where partial indexes do not exist, and say what each permits once three deleted rows already hold that address.

Approach

1. Start from what is actually unique: not (tenant_id, email), but (tenant_id, email) among live rows. PostgreSQL says that directly — CREATE UNIQUE INDEX app_user_live_email ON app_user (tenant_id, email) WHERE deleted_at IS NULL. A full constraint over the same two columns burns the address permanently the first time someone deletes an account.
2. Keep case-insensitivity in the type or the index, never in the application: CITEXT as given, or UNIQUE (tenant_id, lower(email)) as an expression index where the extension is unavailable. A case-sensitive unique column is exactly how two accounts for one human appear.
3. For MySQL 8 the predicate has to move inside the key: add a discriminator column that is a constant 0 while the row is live and is set to user_id on delete, with UNIQUE (tenant_id, email, deleted_marker). Live rows share the constant and still collide; deleted rows differ from each other and stop colliding.
4. State the NULL variant and its dependency: leaving the marker NULL for deleted rows also works, because a unique index treats NULLs as distinct — true in MySQL, and true in PostgreSQL only under the default NULLS DISTINCT, which PostgreSQL 15 lets you reverse. Check the polarity against the three existing deleted rows: constant-on-live is what preserves the collision you want, and reversing it silently admits duplicate live accounts.

Follow-up

• A deleted account re-registers with the same address the next day. Do the old resource rows follow the new user_id, and how does the API keep the two principals apart?
• How do you honour an erasure request while resource_revision.actor_user_id still references this table?

Write the update path that detects a concurrent edit

Medium · optimistic concurrency · transactional outbox · audit history

resource carries version INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 1. resource_revision holds revision_id, resource_id, version, actor_user_id, change_kind, patch JSONB, request_id, created_at with UNIQUE (resource_id, version). outbox_event holds aggregate_type, aggregate_id, aggregate_version, event_type, payload, status. A PUT carries the version the client read. Write the exact statements for the single transaction that applies the edit, records the revision and enqueues 'resource.updated', and give the handler's branch on zero affected rows. Then say what PostgreSQL 16 does under READ COMMITTED when two of these updates hit one row at once.

Approach

1. One transaction, three writes, no network call inside it: UPDATE resource SET title = $3, version = version + 1, updated_at = now() WHERE resource_id = $1 AND tenant_id = $4 AND version = $2; then INSERT the resource_revision row at version $2 + 1; then INSERT the outbox_event row at the same aggregate_version. The event goes to a table rather than a broker because no transaction spans both.
2. Branch on the affected-row count before doing anything else. Zero has three causes — stale version, wrong tenant, row gone — so re-read once and map to 409 carrying the current version, or 404 for an id outside the caller's tenant, which also stops the endpoint confirming that another tenant's id exists.
3. State the engine behaviour instead of assuming it. Under READ COMMITTED the second UPDATE blocks on the row lock, and when the first commits PostgreSQL re-evaluates the WHERE clause against the newly committed row, so the version predicate now fails and the statement reports zero rows. Under REPEATABLE READ the identical collision raises SQLSTATE 40001 instead, so the handler must fold both shapes into one conflict response.
4. Keep UNIQUE (resource_id, version) even though the predicate already serialises writers. It is what makes a lost update unwritable if any other path ever reaches the revision table, and it converts a logic bug into 23505 rather than into a silently missing history row.

Follow-up

• A client sends the version it read ten minutes ago and the resource has moved three versions. What is in your 409 so it can resolve the conflict without a full re-fetch?
• Two editors, two disjoint fields, no overlap. Does your answer still refuse the second write, and should it?

Walk me through the most complex project on your resume. What was your specific contribution?

Medium · Resume and Architectural Deep Dives

Approach

1. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
2. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
3. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
4. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.

Follow-up

• What assumption would you test first?
• How would you know your answer was wrong?

Why did you choose to implement that specific framework instead of an alternative?

Medium · Resume and Architectural Deep Dives

Approach

1. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
2. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
3. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
4. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.

Follow-up

• What assumption would you test first?
• How would you know your answer was wrong?

Explain how you handled data persistence and storage in your previous application.

Medium · Resume and Architectural Deep Dives

Approach

1. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
2. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
3. Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
4. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.

Follow-up

• What assumption would you test first?
• How would you know your answer was wrong?

If you had to scale the project you just described to handle 10x the traffic, what architectural changes would

Medium · Resume and Architectural Deep Dives

If you had to scale the project you just described to handle 10x the traffic, what architectural changes would you make?

Approach

1. Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
2. Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
3. Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
4. State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.

Follow-up

• What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
• How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?

Do you have any certifications in AWS or other major cloud providers?

Medium · Cloud and Infrastructure

Approach

1. Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
2. Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
3. Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
4. State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.

Follow-up

• What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
• How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?

How do you ensure secure data transmission in a cloud-hosted application?

Medium · Cloud and Infrastructure

Approach

1. Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
2. Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
3. Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
4. State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.

Follow-up

• What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
• How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?

Explain the concept of infrastructure as code and why a team might use it.

Medium · Cloud and Infrastructure

Approach

1. Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
2. Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
3. Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
4. State the consistency you need, and where you are willing to be stale.

Follow-up

• What breaks first when traffic grows ten times?
• How does this behave when that dependency is down for an hour?

Listing latency scales with page size, not with filters

Easy · n+1 · latency · query batching

The tenant listing endpoint reads resource filtered by tenant_id and status, ordered by updated_at DESC, and returns each row plus the owner's display name from app_user and the actor of that resource's latest resource_revision. p99 is 55 ms at 10 rows per page and 1.4 s at 200. Database telemetry shows 401 statements per request, each under 1 ms, and nothing in the slow-query log. Diagnose the cause and give the fix, stating the statement count per request and the p99 you expect afterwards.

Approach

1. Read the counters before forming a theory. 401 statements for 200 rows is one driver query plus two per row, and sub-millisecond execution with an empty slow-query log rules out a bad plan. The time is round trips, which is why it is invisible in every per-query metric and scales with rows returned rather than with filter selectivity.
2. Name the two per-row statements from their normalised text: a single-row app_user lookup by user_id, and a resource_revision lookup by resource_id ordered by version DESC LIMIT 1. Confirm by dropping those two response fields and watching the statement count fall to one. That locates the calls in the serialisation layer, not the repository.
3. Check that the arithmetic accounts for the whole gap. Measure one round trip to the replica in isolation; 400 trips at roughly 3 ms of network plus 0.2 ms of execution is about 1.3 s on top of a 55 ms baseline, which matches. If the multiplication had fallen short, the N+1 would only be part of the story and you would keep looking.
4. Batch both lookups. Collect owner_user_ids and resource_ids from the driver query, then issue WHERE tenant_id = $1 AND user_id = ANY($2) for the users, and PostgreSQL's SELECT DISTINCT ON (resource_id) ... WHERE resource_id = ANY($2) ORDER BY resource_id, version DESC for the latest revision, which the UNIQUE (resource_id, version) index serves directly. On an engine without DISTINCT ON, use a lateral join or a row_number window. Three statements per request at any page size.

Follow-up

• The page size is capped at 200 today. What breaks first if it is raised to 2,000, and is it still this bug?
• How do you stop the next N+1 from reaching production, given that no individual query is slow and the endpoint's tests pass?

Suggested practice checklist

Built from the rounds and topics and Huntington candidates report.

Day 1 — Map the and Huntington loop

• Write out the reported sequence: Phone Screen, Core Interview Stages, Technical Assessment, Cultural Fit Discussion.
• For each round, write one sentence on what it is judging, from the description above, and mark the one you are least ready for.

Deliverable: A one-page map of the 4 reported rounds, with the weakest marked.

Day 2 — Work Behavioral Interviewing

• Spend the session on Behavioral Interviewing, which and Huntington candidates report being tested on.
• Write one worked example in Behavioral Interviewing and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Behavioral Interviewing.

Day 3 — Work Technical Interviewing

• Spend the session on Technical Interviewing, which and Huntington candidates report being tested on.
• Write one worked example in Technical Interviewing and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Technical Interviewing.

Day 4 — Work Resume & Project Explanation

• Spend the session on Resume & Project Explanation, which and Huntington candidates report being tested on.
• Write one worked example in Resume & Project Explanation and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Resume & Project Explanation.

Day 5 — Answer out loud: Resume and Architectural Deep Dives

• Answer aloud, timed: Walk me through the most complex project on your resume. What was your specific contribution?
• Answer aloud, timed: Why did you choose to implement that specific framework instead of an alternative?

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Resume and Architectural Deep Dives question(s), under time.

Day 6 — Answer out loud: Core Technical and Coding Concepts

• Answer aloud, timed: Write a function to solve [specific algorithmic challenge] using Coderpad.
• Answer aloud, timed: Explain how garbage collection works in your primary programming language.

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Core Technical and Coding Concepts question(s), under time.

Day 7 — Answer out loud: Cloud and Infrastructure

• Answer aloud, timed: Do you have any certifications in AWS or other major cloud providers?
• Answer aloud, timed: How does your experience with [Cloud Tool A] compare to [Enterprise Cloud Tool B]?

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Cloud and Infrastructure question(s), under time.

Behavioural preparation

Behavioural rounds judge the decision you made and what it cost.

Describe a time you had to migrate or integrate a legacy system with modern technology.

Medium · Resume and Architectural Deep Dives

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?

How does your experience with [Cloud Tool A] compare to [Enterprise Cloud Tool B]?

Medium · Cloud and Infrastructure

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?

Describe your experience working with CI/CD pipelines.

Medium · Cloud and Infrastructure

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior engineer or manager on a technical approach. How did you reso

Medium · Behavioral and Culture Fit

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

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?

Why are you interested in working in the financial sector, specifically at and Huntington?

Medium · Behavioral and Culture Fit

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?

Describe a situation where you had to explain a complex technical concept to a non-technical stakeholder.

Medium · Behavioral and Culture Fit

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?

How do you handle situations where project requirements are highly ambiguous?

Medium · Behavioral and Culture Fit

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?

Tell me about a time you received critical feedback on a code review. How did you respond?

Medium · Behavioral and Culture Fit

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
4. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• What would you do differently if you ran that again?
• How did you know your change caused the improvement?