Eni Spa Software Engineer Interview Questions & Guide 2026

The 60-second brief

A Software Engineer at Eni Spa plays a pivotal role in the digital transformation of one of the world’s most significant energy companies. You are not just writing code; you are building the technological infrastructure that drives efficiency, safety, and innovation across global operations, from upstream exploration to environmental monitoring and technical safety systems.

The behavioural round is a technical round in narrative form. Prepare it by collecting specifics you actually owned, such as a design you argued against, an incident you diagnosed, or a decision you later reversed, rather than by rehearsing phrasing.

Focus areas

• Bound every outbound call with a timeout
• Trace a symptom to a mechanism under load
• Make every write idempotent under retry

Overview

Your work directly impacts how Eni Spa manages complex data, optimizes industrial processes, and meets sustainability targets. Whether you are developing tools for emission monitoring, enhancing telecommunications security, or supporting offshore structure analysis, your contributions enable the organization to solve real-world engineering challenges at scale.

This role requires a unique blend of technical precision and a deep appreciation for industrial safety and operational complexity. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams of geologists, petroleum engineers, and data scientists, making this an ideal environment for those who want their software to have a tangible, physical-world impact.

The Eni Spa interview process

Eni Spa candidates report 6 rounds · ≈ 4-6 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

CV and Cover Letter Screening

An unlabelled round is first an information problem, and the cheapest information is free. Whoever schedules it can usually tell you how long it runs, who will be in the room and what they work on, whether you will be writing code and in what environment, and whether anything is being sent beforehand. Ask in writing so the answer is on record, then prepare for the two or three formats those answers still leave open instead of betting on one. What separates a strong candidate is not guessing right; it is having an opening that works whichever one it turns out to be.

What to demonstrate

• Whether you can start work from an ambiguous brief, since tolerating a vague scope without stalling is the same thing the job asks for
• Whether the questions you asked beforehand were ones that change your preparation, such as duration, medium and who is joining, rather than ones whose answers you could not have acted on
• Whether you adapt when the round turns out to be something other than what you were told, instead of spending the first ten minutes visibly recalibrating

How to prepare

• Send one short scheduling message asking four things: how long, who is joining and what they work on, whether you will be writing code and where, and whether to prepare anything in advance. Treat a vague reply as real information, since it means the round is loosely structured and you will be shaping it yourself.
• Write one opening that works in any of the formats still open: restate in your own words what you have been asked to do, then ask which of two directions is more useful to them. Say it aloud until it stops sounding recited.
• Set up for the two most likely formats before the call starts, with a blank editor in the language you would choose and a shared document you can type into, so a format surprise costs you nothing in the first minutes

Technical Assessments

What this round decides is narrow: whether you can produce code that runs and is correct on inputs nobody showed you. An elegant solution that does not compile scores below a plain one that does, so write a correct brute force first, say out loud that you know its cost, and improve it with the working version still on screen. What separates strong answers is who finds the broken case. Trace your own code against an empty input, a single element, and duplicate keys before you say you are finished, because being told is far more expensive than noticing.

What to demonstrate

• Whether degenerate inputs get checked without being asked for: an empty collection, one element, every element equal, and the extreme value the input type allows
• Whether the complexity you state matches the code you actually wrote, including a sort or a copy sitting inside a loop
• Whether the finished answer is verified against the worked examples before you call it done, rather than assumed correct because the code reads correctly

How to prepare

• Take five problems you have already solved and, without running anything, write down what each returns for empty input, a single element, and all-duplicates. Then run them and count how many you predicted wrong.
• Drill the brute force as its own skill: on ten problems, write only the obviously-correct slow version and time how long it takes to get it passing. If that is more than a few minutes, that is what to practise, not the optimal version.
• Add a fixed last step before you submit anything, reading only the loop bounds and the initial value of each accumulator, which is where most off-by-one errors live

Behavioral Interviews

This round is deciding whether a change you make without supervision can be allowed to reach production. It is scored on what you knew at the moment you decided, not on how it turned out, so a story that opens with the result and works backwards reads as luck retold as judgement. Say what the options were, what you did not know, what you did to shrink the unknown before committing, and what you accepted as the worst plausible case. The detail that separates answers is a bound: how many users, how much data, and for how long, if you had been wrong.

What to demonstrate

• Whether the reasoning you give was available at the time you decided rather than after the result came in, since a story whose deciding evidence arrived later describes an outcome and not a judgement
• Whether you can put units on the exposure (users, rows, minutes of degraded service) and whether the containment you chose actually bounded it: a canary bounds the request path it fronts, while a background job writing to a shared table reaches every user regardless of which version served their requests
• Whether the reversal path existed before you shipped or was improvised during the incident, and whether it restores state or only stops further damage

How to prepare

• For your three largest changes, write down the one thing you would have had to be wrong about for it to fail, and what your best estimate of it was on the day you shipped. If you never held an estimate, that is the gap the follow-up questions will find
• Write the undo procedure for one of those changes as it existed at the time, then mark which steps restore data and which only stop new damage. Turning a flag off or reverting a deploy ends the new writes; rows already written come back only from a copy you kept, and a dropped column comes back empty unless something outside the schema holds the values
• Rehearse one story from the decision point forward and stop before the outcome, then have someone ask what you would do next. If the story only works with the ending attached, it is an anecdote rather than a decision you can defend

Technical Interviews

Input bounds are the part of the prompt most often skimmed, and they usually contain the answer. They tell you which complexity class is admissible, which narrows the search before you have thought about the problem itself. As a rough planning figure, a compiled language does on the order of 10^8 simple operations per second and an interpreted one roughly an order of magnitude less. So n up to about twenty admits enumerating subsets, a few thousand admits a quadratic pass, and a million admits neither: you need near-linear, or linear with a log factor. If the bounds are missing, ask for them.

What to demonstrate

• Whether the approach is justified by the stated input size rather than by whichever pattern you recognised first
• Whether you ask about the properties that change the algorithm: whether the input arrives sorted, whether duplicates occur, whether values are bounded integers, whether it all fits in memory
• Whether you can name the bottleneck in your own solution and what would remove it, even when you deliberately leave it in place
• Whether a claimed speedup is real, since memoising a recursion only helps when subproblems genuinely overlap and the state can be keyed cheaply

How to prepare

• For each algorithm you rely on, write down the largest n it handles in roughly a second, then check two of those figures by timing them in the language you will actually type in
• For two weeks, write one line naming your target complexity and the bound that justifies it before you write any code, then compare that line with what you ended up submitting
• Practise the conversion backwards: given a required O(n log n), list the mechanisms that get you there (sorting, a heap, an ordered map, divide and conquer) and choose by what the problem needs to query, not by what you used last

Group Assessments

Most of the time lost in this format is not lost to thinking. It goes to a standard-library call you half-remember, an off-by-one in a loop bound, and a debugging loop that mutates code at random until something passes. When output is wrong, stop re-reading the whole function: take the smallest input that reproduces it and walk the state through by hand, printing intermediates if the environment allows. Guessing at a fix without a failing case you understand is how a five-minute bug becomes twenty, and the clock does not pause while you do it.

What to demonstrate

• Whether you reach the right structure without a detour, and can write it from memory rather than only recall that one exists
• Whether overflow is considered where the language has fixed-width integers, since a signed 32-bit value stops at 2,147,483,647 and then wraps in Java, is undefined behaviour in C++, and does not arise in Python, whose integers grow instead
• Whether recursion depth is treated as a constraint on large inputs, given that CPython's default limit is 1000 frames and a deep recursion can exhaust the stack in any language where an iterative version would not
• Whether a failing case is isolated and explained before any edit is made to the code

How to prepare

• From an empty file and with no references open, implement the pieces you lean on most: a heap push and pop, an iterative DFS with an explicit stack, and a binary search whose midpoint is written lo + (hi - lo) / 2, which avoids the overflow that (lo + hi) / 2 can hit in a fixed-width integer type
• Time yourself on the ten library calls you look up most, such as sorting with a custom comparator, splitting and joining strings, and finding the next key at or above a value in an ordered map, until the lookup is gone
• Take a solution you know is broken and, before touching it, write one sentence naming the input, the expected value and the actual value. Repeat until you do it without deciding to.

Final Review

A day like this is several different games in a row, and the expensive mistake is carrying the previous one into the next room. Coding rewards narrow precision and finishing inside a timer. Design rewards breadth, stated assumptions and naming what you are deliberately not building. Behavioural rewards specificity about people and decisions. Candidates who over-engineer a coding problem they were supposed to finish, or who start sketching class hierarchies before anyone has agreed what the system has to do, are usually still playing the last round. Between rooms, name out loud which game the next one is.

What to demonstrate

• Whether the coding round ends with something that runs and has been traced against a degenerate input, rather than an extensible design that was never finished
• Whether a design discussion opens by agreeing on traffic shape, read-to-write ratio and what is allowed to be stale, instead of proceeding from an architecture you arrived with
• Whether a behavioural answer names a person, a disagreement and what you did about it, rather than describing the system the story happened inside
• Whether the opening habits still appear late in the day: restating the problem, asking for constraints, saying the plan before typing

How to prepare

• Book three mocks of different types back to back on one afternoon and ask each interviewer afterwards which round you answered in the wrong mode
• Write a three-line opening script per round type — coding: restate, name the approach and its cost, then type; design: ask for scale, read-write mix and what must not break; behavioural: name the person, the stakes and the decision — and run it off a card so the switch is mechanical rather than remembered
• Practise coding with a timer you do not extend, stopping when it stops, so the trained reflex is to finish a correct solution rather than to keep improving one

Where candidates lose points

Paginating with LIMIT/OFFSET over a set that changes while the client is reading it

OFFSET n makes the database produce and discard n rows before returning anything, so the cost of a page grows with its depth rather than with its size and page 500 costs five hundred pages of work. The correctness problem is worse than the cost: if a row is inserted or reordered between two page fetches, rows shift across the offset boundary and are either skipped entirely or returned twice, and neither outcome leaves any trace in the response for the client to detect. Keyset pagination - WHERE (sort_key, id) < ($last_sort_key, $last_id) ORDER BY sort_key DESC, id DESC LIMIT n, backed by an index in exactly that order - reads only the rows it returns and is stable against concurrent inserts. It requires the tie-break column: a timestamp is not unique, and duplicate sort keys straddling a page boundary reintroduce the skip it was adopted to remove.

Shipping a migration and the code that depends on it as a single change

During any rolling deploy, and for as long as a rollback remains possible, old and new code execute against the same schema at the same time. A migration that drops or renames a column breaks every instance that has not restarted yet, and code that requires a column the migration has not applied breaks every instance that restarted early. The discipline is expand then contract: add the new column nullable, write both shapes, backfill in batches, move reads across once the backfill is verified, and only then stop writing the old shape and drop it - four deploys, usually spread over days. It feels disproportionate until the first rollback, at which point it is the only reason the previous version still runs.

Designing for a scale nobody asked for

Ask for request rate, data size, read-to-write ratio and expected growth, then size the simplest option first; one relational instance on current hardware covers a large share of real workloads. Reaching for shards, queues and a cache tier before any number has been quoted reads as pattern-matching rather than judgement.

Abandoning working code to chase the optimal solution

Get the straightforward version correct, state its complexity, and only then optimise, keeping the working version until the faster one passes the same cases. A correct quadratic solution with a stated path to linear beats a half-written optimal one that never ran.

Questions & practice

Merge partitioned event streams into one ordered feed with bounded lateness

Hard · k-way merge · watermarks · out-of-order streams

The read-model service consumes 64 log partitions carrying about 4,000 events per second in total. Each partition is ordered within itself, but partitions drift by up to 30 seconds, and the activity feed must present a tenant's events in occurred_at order. Produce the merge. State its complexity, the buffer it requires in events and in bytes, what happens when one partition is idle, and what you do with an event that arrives after you have already emitted its position. Payloads average 1 KB.

Approach

1. Merge with a min-heap over the 64 partition heads keyed on (occurred_at, event_id): O(log P) per event and O(n log P) overall. The tie-break on event_id is what makes the output deterministic when two partitions carry the same millisecond, which matters because the feed is paginated and a non-deterministic order reorders pages under the reader.
2. Emitting the heap head is only correct once every partition has produced everything up to that timestamp, so the emit condition is a watermark: the minimum across partitions of the highest occurred_at seen, less the allowed lateness. Events are held until the watermark passes them, which is what turns individually ordered streams into a jointly ordered one.
3. Size the buffer from the lateness rather than guessing: 4,000 events per second times 30 seconds is 120,000 buffered events, and at 1 KB each about 120 MB of heap. That number is the real price of the ordering guarantee and belongs in front of whoever asked for it.
4. Handle the idle partition explicitly, because it fails the feed rather than corrupting it: a partition with no traffic never advances its own maximum, so the watermark freezes and output stops entirely. Either every partition emits a periodic idle marker carrying the broker's current time, or the watermark falls back to wall clock for a partition silent beyond a threshold.
5. Choose the late-event policy from what the projection is keyed on. The projection upserts on (aggregate_id, aggregate_version) and discards a version it has already applied, so a late event is safe to apply out of order and correctness never depended on the merge at all. Apply it, recompute the affected feed page, and count lateness so the 30-second budget can be re-derived from data rather than folklore.
6. Say what the merge does not buy: ordering is guaranteed within one aggregate by the log's partitioning, and no watermark makes the cross-aggregate order authoritative. Two events from different aggregates in the same millisecond have no true order, so the feed's order is a presentation choice that must be stable rather than correct.

Worked solution (35 min)

1. Write the heap comparator on (occurred_at, event_id) and the per-partition head refill.
2. Write the watermark computation and the emit-loop condition, then list which buffered events are held at a chosen instant.
3. Compute the buffer at 4,000 events per second, 30 seconds and 1 KB per event, and state what fraction of a worker's heap that represents.
4. Add the idle-partition marker and trace the watermark with one silent partition, both with and without the marker.
5. Write the late-event path and name the key that makes applying it safe.

Expected result: A 64-way min-heap merge at O(n log P) with a deterministic (occurred_at, event_id) comparator, a watermark of the per-partition minimum less 30 seconds gating emission, a stated buffer of 120,000 events and roughly 120 MB, idle markers so a silent partition cannot freeze the watermark, and a late-event policy justified by the projection's idempotency on (aggregate_id, aggregate_version).

Verify it yourself

• Feeding the partitions in an adversarial interleaving produces the same output sequence as feeding them in timestamp order.
• Silencing one partition stalls output without the idle marker and does not stall it with the marker.
• Applying a late event twice leaves the projection byte-identical, which is what permits the out-of-order path to exist.

Follow-up

• The lateness budget is raised to five minutes. What is the new buffer, and what besides memory changes?
• The consumer restarts. Where does it resume from, and what does the feed look like for the first 30 seconds?
• One partition is ten minutes behind because its producer is slow. Do you stall the feed or emit without it?

Diff a projection against the primary without per-row point reads

Hard · reconciliation · range hashing · throttling

The listing projection has drifted and some rows show a stale version. The primary holds 40,000,000 resource rows across 12,000 tenants while serving 1,200 writes and 14,000 reads per second. The obvious repair, reading each resource row and comparing its version against the projection, is correct and would eventually finish. Explain precisely why it is unacceptable here, then give a diff that finds the differing rows, state its complexity, and make it safe to run against a live primary. Replication lag is usually under 100 ms and is not bounded.

Approach

1. Quantify the naive cost rather than calling it slow: 40,000,000 point reads at even 0.5 ms each is over five hours serialised, and the only lever is concurrency, which is exactly what you cannot spend. The primary's pool is sized for the write path, and 40,000,000 random reads evict the buffer cache that sustains the 85 percent cache hit rate, so the audit degrades the system it is auditing.
2. Replace random access with one ordered pass per side. Both sides can be read in (tenant_id, resource_id) order, which is a sequential scan on each and a merge join in O(n) time and O(1) memory. For a dense diff that is the whole answer, and it reads the primary once instead of 40,000,000 times.
3. For the expected sparse case, compare range hashes instead of rows: partition the key space, compute per range an order-independent aggregate over hash(resource_id, version), compare aggregates, and descend only into ranges that differ. With d differing rows and branching factor B, at most d ranges mismatch per level, so the drill-down examines O(d log_B(n/d)) ranges and reads full rows only in mismatching leaves.
4. Aggregate with a sum modulo 2^64 or a multiset hash, never XOR. XOR is order-independent but self-cancelling, so two rows wrong in the same way, or a row duplicated on one side, leave the range aggregate matching and the range is declared clean.
5. Pin the comparison to a point in time or it reports lag as drift: consider only rows whose updated_at is older than now minus a lag margin, and re-check each candidate mismatch individually before repairing. At 1,200 writes per second a diff without this reports thousands of false positives, and an unattended repairer would then overwrite live rows with stale values.
6. Make the run resumable and throttled: batch by range key, persist the last completed range, and watch a signal such as replica lag or primary CPU, pausing rather than pressing on. A reconciliation that cannot be stopped and resumed gets killed halfway and restarted from zero, which is how a repair becomes an incident.

Follow-up

• The diff reports 900 stale rows. How do you decide between patching those rows and rebuilding the projection from resource_revision?
• Same job, but the projection lives in a search index that cannot be scanned in key order. What changes?
• How would you run this continuously at low cost instead of only as incident response?

Find overlapping job attempts and peak concurrency from lease records

Medium · sweep line · intervals · leases

A day of job_run history yields about 50,000,000 attempt records: (job_run_id, job_type, attempt, started_at, finished_at which is NULL when the worker died, lease_expires_at). Leases expire on a clock, so a job that outran its lease ran twice. Produce (a) every job_run_id whose attempts overlapped in wall-clock time and (b) the peak number of simultaneously running attempts per job_type with the minute it occurred. Target O(n log n). State how you treat a NULL finished_at and what clock skew does to your answer.

Approach

1. Define the interval before sorting anything: an attempt occupies [started_at, COALESCE(finished_at, lease_expires_at)). finished_at is observed and lease_expires_at is only a promise, so every attempt without a finish contributes an estimate and the whole result is a lower bound on overlap rather than an exact count.
2. For peak concurrency, sweep: emit 2n endpoints, sort by (timestamp, kind) with ends ordered before starts at equal timestamps, then walk the sequence maintaining a counter per job_type and record each type's maximum with its timestamp. O(n log n) dominated by the sort, O(n) space, or O(1) extra if the sort is external and the walk streams.
3. For overlap detection, do not compare attempts pairwise. A single global sort by (job_run_id, started_at) gives both the grouping and the order; within a group, keep the maximum end seen so far and report an overlap exactly when the next start is less than that running maximum, which is one linear pass after the sort.
4. Half-open intervals matter and are easy to get wrong: with closed intervals an attempt ending at the same millisecond another begins reads as concurrency two, and across 50,000,000 records that artefact swamps the real signal.
5. State the clock caveat: started_at and finished_at are written by different workers, so under skew of a few hundred milliseconds an apparent overlap shorter than that bound is not evidence. Filter reported overlaps by a minimum duration, or prefer timestamps written by whichever component heartbeats the lease.
6. Scale the sort rather than assuming it fits: the sweep emits two endpoints per attempt, so 50,000,000 records become 100,000,000 endpoints, and at roughly 24 bytes each, an 8-byte timestamp plus a 4-byte job_type plus a kind flag padded to alignment, that is about 2.4 GB of sort keys before any scratch space. Either push the ordering into the database behind an index on (job_type, started_at) or run an external merge sort in chunks; the overlap pass sorts n records rather than 2n, so it is the cheaper of the two.

Follow-up

• A handler is not idempotent and you have found 400 overlapping jobs. Which of them actually caused damage, and what would you query to find out?
• Peak concurrency for one job_type is 4 against a configured cap of 4. Is the cap working, or is the data hiding attempts that never started?
• How would you compute both answers incrementally as records arrive rather than in a daily batch?

Hold a per-tenant active cap against concurrent creates

Hard · write skew · isolation levels · constraints

A tenant on the standard plan may hold at most 50 resources with status='active'. The create handler runs SELECT count(*) FROM resource WHERE tenant_id = $1 AND status = 'active', compares to 50, then inserts. Two creates arrive 3 ms apart on different instances and the tenant lands at 51. Name the anomaly, say whether PostgreSQL 16 READ COMMITTED or REPEATABLE READ prevents it and why, then give an implementation that holds the cap at READ COMMITTED with the exact statements. Finally, say what changes when the cap is 'at most one running export per tenant' on job_run.

Approach

1. Name it: write skew. The two transactions read an overlapping set and write disjoint rows, so there is no row-level conflict for the engine to detect and each commit is individually legal.
2. Rule out the levels precisely. READ COMMITTED takes a fresh snapshot per statement and takes no lock on the counted rows, so both see 49. PostgreSQL's REPEATABLE READ is snapshot isolation: it removes non-repeatable reads and phantoms within the snapshot but still admits write skew, because the anomaly is not a re-read of a changed row, it is a read of a set that a concurrent transaction invalidates. Only SERIALIZABLE closes it, by tracking the read dependency and aborting one transaction with SQLSTATE 40001 — a guarantee that exists only if the application re-runs the whole transaction from the read.
3. Convert the set predicate into a single-row conflict: keep tenant.active_resource_count and run UPDATE tenant SET active_resource_count = active_resource_count + 1 WHERE tenant_id = $1 AND active_resource_count < 50 in the same transaction as the INSERT. Zero affected rows is the cap, returned as 409. The row lock serialises the decision at any isolation level, and contention is bounded to one tenant's row — which is also the fair-scheduling unit, unlike a global counter that would convoy every tenant behind one row.
4. State the cost you just took on: a counter is a second source of truth that can drift, so every path that changes status must adjust it inside the same transaction, and a periodic reconciliation has to exist, with resource_revision as the authority for what the count should have been.
5. For the job case the invariant is expressible per row, so let the database hold it: a partial unique index on job_run (tenant_id, job_type) WHERE status IN ('queued','running') makes a second running export unwritable and the loser takes 23505, mapped to 409. That is strictly better than a counter — no drift, no reconciliation — and it is available only because the cap is one rather than fifty.
6. Add the retry discipline each route demands: under SERIALIZABLE both 40001 and deadlock 40P01 are retryable and the retry must re-execute the read, while under READ COMMITTED with the counter nothing retries, because the conflict is reported to the caller rather than raised as an error.

Follow-up

• A resource moves from archived back to active. Which statements change, and what breaks if the counter update and the status change land in different transactions?
• The cap becomes plan-dependent and a plan can change mid-month. Where does the number 50 live, and who reads it?
• How do you detect after the fact that the counter drifted, without locking the 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.
5. Refuse to auto-retry the whole PUT. A retry re-reads the winner's state and reapplies an intent formed against data that no longer exists — the silent overwrite the version token was added to detect. Return the conflict; merge field-wise only if the patches are provably disjoint.
6. Note that now() is the transaction timestamp in PostgreSQL, so resource.updated_at, the revision's created_at and the outbox row share one instant, which is what later makes reconciliation between the three tables unambiguous.

Worked solution (25 min)

1. Write the three statements plus the rowcount branch and confirm they sit in one BEGIN/COMMIT with no outbound call between them.
2. Run two clients that both read version 7 and apply their updates 5 ms apart; assert one 200 and one 409.
3. Assert resource.version = 8, exactly one resource_revision row at version 8, and one outbox_event row at aggregate_version 8.
4. Repeat at REPEATABLE READ and record the different failure shape (SQLSTATE 40001) the handler must also map to 409.
5. Delete the version predicate and re-run: both writes commit and the first edit disappears with no error raised anywhere.

Expected result: Exactly one of the two commits. version = 8 with one revision row and one outbox row at version 8, the loser gets 409 carrying version 8, and no state exists in which the resource moved but the revision or the outbox row is missing.

Verify it yourself

• COUNT(*) of resource_revision for that resource equals resource.version, with no gap in the version sequence.
• Kill the process between the UPDATE and the outbox INSERT — the transaction rolls back and no event describes a change that never happened.
• Under a 50-way race, resource.version equals the number of 2xx responses rather than the number of requests.

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?
• Every write now touches a second hot table. How do you keep the outbox insert and its partial index from becoming the write bottleneck at 1.2k writes/second?

How do you approach a situation where you have limited time to reach a decision?

Medium

Approach

1. Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
2. Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
3. State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.

Follow-up

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

If I asked you to procure specific industrial equipment, how would you decide between two different vendors with varying price structures?

Medium

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

Design the bulk write endpoint a migration script retries blindly

Medium · batch api · partial failure · idempotency

A customer's migration script pushes 2 million resources through POST /v1/resources:batch, up to 500 items per call, and retries any call that errors or times out. Within a call some items fail validation, some collide with rows that already exist, and some succeed. Specify the request and response shape, whether a batch is atomic or per-item, how idempotency works for the call and for each item, the status code for a mixed outcome, the size and item-count limits with their error codes, and exactly what the script does after a timeout mid-batch.

Approach

1. Choose atomicity deliberately and price it. All-or-nothing means one transaction holding locks for the whole batch on a primary already absorbing about 1.2k writes/second, which bounds batch size by lock duration, and it turns one bad row into 499 rejections the script must resend. Per-item partial success is the right default for a migration, and the contract's job is then to make a partial outcome impossible to miss.
2. Require a client-supplied id on every item and echo it in every result. Deriving a per-item key from the array index breaks the first time the script resends a batch with the failures removed: the indices shift, previously-succeeded items acquire new keys, and they are created a second time.
3. Key the effects at two levels. The call's Idempotency-Key covers an exact resend of the same bytes; per-item keys of (tenant_id, client_item_id) make a partially-applied batch safe to resend whole. Resending an identical batch must reproduce the same per-item results, not 500 conflicts the script has to interpret.
4. Answer a mixed outcome with one status plus per-item detail: 200, or 207 borrowed from WebDAV if you prefer it - document whichever you pick - carrying an array of client_item_id, per-item status, and either resource_id or an error code from the same taxonomy the single-item endpoint uses. Reserve 4xx for the request as a whole: unparseable body, too many items, payload over the limit (413). Put a failed count at the top level so that even a script checking only the cheapest thing cannot conclude success while rows were dropped.
5. Cap the request before doing any of it: item count, total bytes, and concurrent batches per tenant, since one tenant's migration otherwise consumes write capacity everyone shares. Anything that cannot finish inside the request deadline belongs on job_run behind a 202, not in a synchronous call that will time out halfway.
6. Script behaviour after a timeout: the outcome is unknown and no results were received, so resend the identical batch with the same keys and read the results. Never resend 'only the items I have no result for' - a timeout yields no results at all, and that rule silently means resend everything anyway.

Worked solution (30 min)

1. Write the request schema with the per-item client id, and the response schema with per-item status and a top-level failed count.
2. Write the atomicity decision and the sentence of justification that names the lock cost or the resend cost.
3. Define both key levels and trace a resend of a half-applied batch through them, item by item.
4. List the whole-request rejections with their status codes and limits.
5. Write the script's timeout rule and the pacing it should apply between calls.

Expected result: A per-item batch with client-supplied item ids, per-item idempotency plus a call-level key, a mixed-outcome response that a status-only check cannot misread, explicit request caps, and a resend rule that is correct when no results were received.

Verify it yourself

• Resending an identical batch twice leaves exactly the same set of resource rows as sending it once.
• Resending a batch with the successful items removed does not create duplicates of anything.
• A caller that reads only the top-level fields can still tell that some items failed.

Follow-up

• At 500 items per call, what is the wall-clock time for 2 million rows, and what pacing do you publish so the migration does not become an incident?
• One item in every batch fails with the same code. How does the script discover that without a human reading logs?

Edge instances grow 400 MB per hour until the nightly restart

Hard · memory leak · heap analysis · metric cardinality · gc

Edge API instances start at 700 MB resident and grow about 400 MB/hour; a nightly rolling restart has hidden it for weeks. Growth continues unchanged when request rate halves overnight, p99 degrades in the last hours before an instance is recycled, and heap used immediately after a forced full GC rises monotonically. The service holds no product state. Name the discriminating measurement that separates the plausible causes, give the most likely cause, and give the fix and how you would verify it.

Approach

1. Separate resident memory from live heap first, because they fail differently. Resident size can grow from fragmentation, native buffers or thread stacks while the heap is flat; heap used after a full GC rising monotonically is the measurement that says objects are reachable and not being released. You already have it, so this is retention, not fragmentation, and that closes off half the candidate list.
2. Use the rate's independence from traffic as the discriminator. Growth that continues at half the request rate rules out per-request objects that are merely slow to collect and points at a structure that grows with distinct values observed rather than with call volume. Write the candidates that have that property: a metrics registry keyed on a high-cardinality label, an unevicted cache, an interner, a per-key lock map.
3. Take two heap snapshots an hour apart and diff by retained size, reading the dominator tree, not by allocation count or instance count. Expect one root holding a map with millions of entries, then follow the reference chain to the code that inserts and never removes. Allocation profilers point at churn, which is the wrong signal here.
4. The candidate that fits this service is an observability label carrying an identifier, such as a request path recorded before templating so that /v1/resources/48213 becomes its own metric series. That grows with distinct ids seen, is independent of rate, and explains the late p99 degradation, since GC cost rises with the size of the live set.
5. Fix by bounding cardinality at the source: template the path to /v1/resources/{id} before it becomes a label, move tenant id from a label to a log field or an exemplar, and cap the registry with a bounded map that evicts. Add a cardinality ceiling that fails loudly in a lower environment rather than growing quietly in production.
6. Verify with a soak rather than a restart. Hold one instance out of the nightly recycle for 48 hours with the fix and compare post-GC heap and series count against an unfixed control taking the same traffic.

Follow-up

• Post-GC heap is now flat but resident size still creeps. What are you looking at, and does it matter?
• How would you have detected this before an OOM, given the nightly restart masked the trend?
• That label is what makes one dashboard useful. How do you keep the dashboard and lose the leak?

Suggested practice checklist

Roughly ninety minutes on weeknights with one longer weekend block. The plan cuts scope rather than compressing everything, on the assumption that one thing finished per night beats four half-started.

Day 1 — Fix the scope and take a cold baseline

• Read the role description and write the three things the loop will almost certainly test, then write an explicit not-doing list and keep it visible all week.
• Take one twenty-five-minute coding problem and one fifteen-minute design prompt cold, and write the single sentence naming what blocked each, because those two sentences decide where the remaining evenings go.
• Set the week's rule: one thing finished every night, including the night you only have forty minutes.

Deliverable: A one-page scope with a not-doing list and two cold attempts, each carrying one sentence on what blocked it.

Day 2 — One pattern, written three times from blank

• Choose the single pattern most likely to appear in your loop and write it three times from an empty file rather than editing the previous attempt.
• On the third pass, write the invariant as a comment before the loop body and the complexity before the first line of code.
• Stop at ninety minutes even if the third version is imperfect, and write the one thing you would fix given another hour.

Deliverable: Three independent implementations of the same pattern plus a note on what changed between them.

Day 3 — One design, only to the depth you can defend

• Take one system shape and go only as far as requirements, interface and data model, refusing to draw a box you could not survive a follow-up about.
• Attach one number to each non-functional requirement, deriving it rather than asserting it, and write the assumption the number rests on.
• Write the one tradeoff you are choosing against and the observation that would make you reverse it.

Deliverable: One design at interface-and-schema depth with derived numbers and one written reversible tradeoff.

Day 4 — Only the fundamentals you will have to defend

• Write, in under two hundred words each, the answers to the two questions that follow almost any implementation: why this structure and not the obvious alternative, and what happens to this code at a hundred times the input.
• Write what an index actually costs: faster lookups on the indexed columns against a write that now maintains a second structure, plus the cases where the planner declines to use it anyway, low selectivity, or a predicate wrapping the column in a function.
• Delete any answer you cannot deliver aloud in under a minute, since an answer that needs reading is not an answer you have.

Deliverable: Three written answers, each under two hundred words and each timed aloud.

Day 5 — Your own work, timed

• Write a ninety-second and a four-minute version of your main project and time both aloud rather than reading them.
• Prepare the two follow-ups that always come: what you would do differently, and how you knew it worked.
• Put one number in the first sentence and be ready to say exactly where it came from and what it excludes.

Deliverable: Two timed narratives with one defensible number in the opening line.

Day 6 — The one full rehearsal, in the weekend block

• Run a sixty-minute mock covering a coding round and a design round in one sitting with no break, because sustained attention is the thing evenings have not trained.
• Immediately afterwards, and before hearing any feedback, write the three moments you lost the thread.
• Spend the rest of the block only on those three moments, and on nothing you merely feel shaky about.

Deliverable: Mock notes naming three failure moments with a specific fix written under each.

Day 7 — Taper

• Write the twenty-minute warm-up you will actually do on the morning: one problem you can already solve from a blank file, one design you can narrate, and nothing you have never seen.
• Re-read only your own notes from this week and open no new material.
• Write the logistics down: the editor or shared document you will be working in, whether execution and lookups are permitted, and the sentence you will use when you do not know something.

Deliverable: A one-page card holding the design structure, the project numbers, and the logistics.

'We rewrote it in a better framework' is not a story

A migration is a cost you chose to pay, not an achievement. The story is what the old system made expensive, what you measured before committing, what kept serving traffic during the cutover, and what you would have done if the numbers had come back flat. Without those, a rewrite reads as taste.

How do you react when you encounter difficulty or resistance in your work?

Medium · behavioural and engineering judgement

Approach

1. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
2. Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
3. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.

Follow-up

• What did you decide not to do, and why?
• What would you do differently if you ran that again?

How would your friends describe you?

Medium · behavioural and engineering judgement

Approach

1. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
2. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
3. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.

Follow-up

• How did you know your change caused the improvement?
• What did you decide not to do, and why?

How do you deal with conflict within a team?

Medium · behavioural and engineering judgement

Approach

1. Name the disagreement and how you resolved it with evidence.
2. State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
3. Close with what you would do differently, concretely.

Follow-up

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

Why do you want to work for Eni Spa?

Medium · behavioural and engineering judgement

Approach

1. Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
2. Close with what you would do differently, concretely.
3. Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.

Follow-up

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