Interview guides · Pri Technology
Pri Technology Software Engineer Interview Guide
Pri Technology Software Engineer interview guide: reported rounds, questions and how candidates describe the process.
The 60-second brief
A Software Engineer at Pri Technology plays a critical role in designing, building, and maintaining high-performance systems and enterprise platforms for major organizations. Because Pri Technology operates as a premier technology solutions and staffing partner, engineers are placed in high-impact positions across elite client environments, including major financial institutions, corporate headquarters, and enterprise operations in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state areas. In this role, your impact is immediate and highly visible. You are not just writing isolated code; you are architecting cloud infrastructure, automating complex business workflows, and securing massive enterprise collaboration environments.
This guide is scoped to a Software Engineer candidate at Pri Technology.
Focus areas
- ServiceNow Development
- Azure Systems Engineering
- Cloud Infrastructure (Azure)
The Pri Technology interview process
Pri Technology candidates report 3 rounds over 3-5 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.
Initial Screening
Conducted by a Pri Technology recruiter to discuss background, career goals, and basic technical alignment.
What to demonstrate
- Conducted by a Pri Technology recruiter to discuss background, career goals, and basic technical alignment
- Depth in ServiceNow Development
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.
Technical Assessment
Rigorous technical screening interview by internal subject matter experts to verify coding, scripting, or architectural capabilities.
What to demonstrate
- Rigorous technical screening interview by internal subject matter experts to verify coding, scripting, or architectural capabilities
- Depth in ServiceNow Development
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: How do you manage and secure network traffic between virtual networks (VNets) in Azure, and what tools do you use for monitoring?
- Answer aloud and timed: Explain your approach to troubleshooting a performance bottleneck on a VMware vSphere cluster hosting critical enterprise databases.
Client-Facing Interviews
Includes a technical panel interview, a system design or live troubleshooting scenario, and a final behavioral/leadership round.
What to demonstrate
- Includes a technical panel interview, a system design or live troubleshooting scenario, and a final behavioral/leadership round
- Depth in ServiceNow Development
How to prepare
- Answer aloud and timed: What strategies do you employ to optimize cloud spend and resource utilization in a large-scale Azure deployment?
- Answer aloud and timed: Explain how you would design and implement a custom integration between ServiceNow and an external third-party system using REST APIs.
Where candidates lose points
Master the fundamentals
Do not neglect basic computer science and systems engineering principles. Whether it is understanding TCP/IP networking, database indexing, or clean code principles, a strong grasp of the fundamentals will help you navigate unexpected questions.
Be ready for scripting
Almost every technical track at Pri Technology requires some level of automation or custom development. Practice writing clean, error-resistant scripts (JavaScript for ServiceNow, PowerShell for Systems/Cloud roles) on a whiteboard or text editor.
Highlight your scale
When discussing your past projects, always include metrics that demonstrate the scale and impact of your work. Mention the number of users supported, data volumes handled, or percentage improvements in system performance.
Showcase your client-facing skills
Remember that you are being evaluated not just as an engineer, but as a representative of Pri Technology. Demonstrate professionalism, active listening, and a collaborative attitude in every interaction.
Questions & practice
Identify the heaviest tenants in a five-minute window under memory pressure
Medium · top-k · heavy hitters · streaming
The edge service handles about 3,000 requests per second across roughly 50,000 tenants, peaking near 9,000. Expose the 50 heaviest tenants by request count over the trailing five minutes so limits can be tightened before one tenant's backfill starves the fleet. You may not retain five minutes of raw records. Give the exact solution and its memory, then the bounded-memory approximation with its error stated as a formula, and say which you would ship and at what tenant cardinality that choice changes.
Approach
- Do the exact version first, because it is affordable at this cardinality: a ring of 300 one-second counters per tenant, advanced lazily, is 1,200 bytes of counters per tenant and roughly 60 to 90 MB for 50,000 tenants with overhead. Carry a running total and subtract the bucket you overwrite so a window read is O(1) rather than 300 adds.
- Extract the top 50 with a size-k min-heap over the tenant sums: O(d log k) for d tenants, against O(d log d) to sort them all. Maintaining the heap continuously instead of on query requires a tenant-to-heap-index map, because incrementing a count already inside the heap means sifting from a known position, and without that map you rebuild the heap on every request.
- State the approximation precisely rather than gesturing at sketches. Misra-Gries with m counters retains every item whose true count exceeds N/(m+1), and each retained count underestimates the truth by at most N/(m+1). With m = 1,000 and N = 900,000 requests in the window the error is roughly 900 requests, which is fine for spotting a tenant sending 50,000 and useless for ranking two tenants 200 apart.
- Say what breaks when the window slides: Misra-Gries and Space-Saving are insert-only and cannot be decremented as records age out. The workable construction is one summary per sub-window, say ten seconds, with 30 summaries merged at query time, and the merged error is the sum of the per-summary errors, so the bound degrades linearly in the number of sub-windows.
Follow-up
- The heaviest tenant is heavy because of one export job rather than user traffic. Should the limiter treat those as the same tenant?
- Two tenants sit tied at the boundary of the top 50. Does your answer flap, and does the flapping matter?
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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?
Canonicalise a request body into a stable idempotency fingerprint
Medium · parsing · canonicalisation · hashing
idempotency_key.request_fingerprint is a SHA-256 over the method, path and canonicalised body, and a retry whose fingerprint differs must be rejected with 422 rather than served the stored response. Write the canonicaliser. Bodies are JSON up to 256 KB nested at most 32 levels; clients vary key order, whitespace and unicode escaping, and some send 64-bit ids as JSON numbers. Produce a deterministic byte string such that semantically identical bodies match and any semantic difference does not. State your complexity and name two normalisations you refuse to perform.
Approach
- Parse once into a tree, then re-serialise under fixed rules: object keys sorted, array order preserved, one escaping convention, no insignificant whitespace. Parsing is O(n) and sorting keys is O(k log k) per object, so O(n log n) overall with O(depth) stack, and the 32-level cap is enforced during parsing because hostile nesting is how a canonicaliser becomes a stack overflow.
- Sort keys by their UTF-8 bytes and say why the obvious implementation is wrong in some runtimes: a default string comparison that orders by UTF-16 code units places surrogate pairs, meaning code points from U+10000 up, below U+E000 to U+FFFF, which is not UTF-8 byte order, so two services written in different languages disagree on the same document.
- Do not re-encode numbers through a double. IEEE-754 binary64 represents integers exactly only up to 2^53, so normalising a 19-digit id through a float changes it, and 1 against 1.0 cannot be reconciled without deciding whether they are the same value. Preserve the literal token, and require ids as strings at the API boundary if you want them comparable.
- Reject duplicate keys rather than picking one. JSON permits them and parsers disagree, most keeping the last, so any choice you make ties the fingerprint to a parser detail that the code handling the request does not necessarily share.
Follow-up
- A client sends the same logical request with an extra field your API ignores. Same key, different fingerprint, so you return 422. Is that the right answer?
- Where does the fingerprint get computed relative to request decompression and the body-size limit?
Denormalise tenant onto revisions and backfill it live
Hard · denormalisation · online migration · backfill
resource_revision (revision_id, resource_id, version, actor_user_id, change_kind, patch, request_id, created_at) has 400M rows and no tenant column; tenant_id lives only on resource. Two reads need it: a tenant-scoped audit feed ordered by created_at DESC, and an offboarding purge. Both join back to resource today. Justify adding tenant_id to resource_revision against those two reads, name the anomaly the copy introduces and the constraint that prevents it, then give the ordered migration for a live table taking 1.2k writes/second — the lock each step takes, how the backfill is batched, and where each step stops being reversible. PostgreSQL 16.
Approach
- Justify from the access path rather than from taste. Without the column, the audit feed either scans resource_revision by created_at and discards other tenants' rows, or resolves the tenant's resource_ids first and probes with them — both proportional to the tenant's whole history rather than to one page. With (tenant_id, created_at DESC, revision_id DESC) it is a seek that stops at 50 rows, and the purge becomes a ranged delete instead of a join.
- Name the cost exactly: a second copy of a fact can disagree with the first. Make the disagreement unwritable rather than documented — add UNIQUE (resource_id, tenant_id) on resource so it can serve as a foreign-key target, then FOREIGN KEY (resource_id, tenant_id) REFERENCES resource (resource_id, tenant_id) on the revision table. A revision can then only ever carry its parent's tenant.
- Step one, expand: ALTER TABLE resource_revision ADD COLUMN tenant_id BIGINT NULL, with no default, so it is a catalogue change and no rewrite. It still needs ACCESS EXCLUSIVE for an instant, and that instant queues behind the longest open transaction on the table while every later query queues behind it — set lock_timeout to 2s and retry rather than wait.
- Step two, dual-write: deploy the writer that populates tenant_id on every new revision while reads still use the join. Reversible by redeploying the previous build, because nothing reads the column yet.
Follow-up
- The backfill is half finished and a rollback is required. What state is the table in, and what does the previous build do with a half-populated column?
- How do you verify the backfill actually finished, given rows are still being inserted while it runs?
Stop tag and share joins from fanning out a page
Medium · join fan-out · semi-joins · many-to-many
resource_tag is (resource_id, tag_id) with PK (resource_id, tag_id); resource_share is (resource_id, shared_with_user_id, permission). The tagged-and-shared listing inner-joins resource to both, filters tenant_id, tag_id = ANY($2) and shared_with_user_id = $3, orders by updated_at DESC and takes 50. Pages come back with fewer than 50 distinct resources and the total in the header is far too high. Explain the row multiplication, rewrite both the page query and the count query so each is correct, and name the index each one needs. PostgreSQL 16.
Approach
- Do the arithmetic against the predicates that are actually there. An inner join emits one row per matching child row, and both joins are filtered: tag_id = ANY($2) admits only the requested tags, shared_with_user_id = $3 admits one user's share rows. So a resource holding three of the requested tags and shared with $3 once yields three rows, not one — the multiplier is its count of matching tags times its share rows for that single user, and that second factor is 1 unless the table admits duplicate (resource_id, shared_with_user_id) pairs. LIMIT 50 then limits rows rather than resources, and COUNT(*) counts pairs — the header is the product, not the population.
- Reject DISTINCT as the fix. It deduplicates after the product has been built, so the planner must materialise and sort the fanned-out set before the LIMIT can apply, and it leaves any SUM or AVG in the same select list wrong.
- Rewrite both filters as semi-joins, keeping resource as the only row source: AND EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM resource_tag rt WHERE rt.resource_id = r.resource_id AND rt.tag_id = ANY($2)) and the same shape against resource_share. A semi-join stops at the first match per resource and preserves the driving index order, so ORDER BY updated_at DESC, resource_id DESC LIMIT 50 still stops after 50 rows.
- Count with the same predicates and no join at all: SELECT count(*) FROM resource r WHERE r.tenant_id = $1 AND r.status = 'active' AND EXISTS (...) AND EXISTS (...). Nothing multiplies a resource, so the number is the population.
Follow-up
- The filter changes from 'any of these tags' to 'all of these tags'. Rewrite it and state what it costs relative to the ANY form.
- A resource can be shared with the same user twice under different permissions. Does your count change, and should it?
How do you design a highly available hybrid cloud architecture using Azure and on-premises VMware environments
Medium · Cloud & Virtualization Engineering
How do you design a highly available hybrid cloud architecture using Azure and on-premises VMware environments?
Approach
- Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
- Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
- Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
- 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?
Describe a scenario where you had to migrate a legacy, on-premises workload to Azure with minimal downtime. Wh
Medium · Cloud & Virtualization Engineering
Describe a scenario where you had to migrate a legacy, on-premises workload to Azure with minimal downtime. What was your strategy?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
How do you manage and secure network traffic between virtual networks (VNets) in Azure, and what tools do you
Medium · Cloud & Virtualization Engineering
How do you manage and secure network traffic between virtual networks (VNets) in Azure, and what tools do you use for monitoring?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
What strategies do you employ to optimize cloud spend and resource utilization in a large-scale Azure deployme
Medium · Cloud & Virtualization Engineering
What strategies do you employ to optimize cloud spend and resource utilization in a large-scale Azure deployment?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- 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 would design and implement a custom integration between ServiceNow and an external third-party
Medium · Enterprise Platform Development (Service
Explain how you would design and implement a custom integration between ServiceNow and an external third-party system using REST APIs.
Approach
- Say who the caller is and what they do when the call fails halfway.
- Define the identity of a request so a retry cannot double-apply it.
- Separate accepted, pending, failed and confirmed; they are different facts.
- Design the error taxonomy before the success shape; callers branch on it.
Follow-up
- What happens if the caller retries after a timeout?
- How does a client discover it is on an old version of this contract?
How do you manage update sets across multi-developer environments to prevent collisions and ensure smooth depl
Medium · Enterprise Platform Development (Service
How do you manage update sets across multi-developer environments to prevent collisions and ensure smooth deployments to production?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
What is the difference between a Client Script and a Business Rule, and when would you use one over the other
Medium · Enterprise Platform Development (Service
What is the difference between a Client Script and a Business Rule, and when would you use one over the other to optimize platform performance?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
Describe how you have configured and customized the ServiceNow CMDB (Configuration Management Database) to sup
Medium · Enterprise Platform Development (Service
Describe how you have configured and customized the ServiceNow CMDB (Configuration Management Database) to support ITIL processes.
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
How do you write secure, reusable script includes in JavaScript within the ServiceNow scoped application model
Medium · Enterprise Platform Development (Service
How do you write secure, reusable script includes in JavaScript within the ServiceNow scoped application model?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
How do you configure tenant-wide security and compliance policies in Microsoft 365 while maintaining a seamles
Medium · Systems Engineering & Modern Workplace
How do you configure tenant-wide security and compliance policies in Microsoft 365 while maintaining a seamless user experience?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- Work from the requirement backwards to the design.
Follow-up
- What assumption would you test first?
- How would you know your answer was wrong?
How do you design and execute a migration plan from an on-premises Exchange server to Exchange Online?
Medium · Systems Engineering & Modern Workplace
Approach
- Fix the scope first: who calls this, how often, and what they do when it fails.
- Name the read and write paths separately; they rarely have the same bottleneck.
- Choose a partition key and say what query it makes expensive.
- 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?
What security frameworks and identity management strategies (such as MFA or Conditional Access) do you impleme
Medium · Systems Engineering & Modern Workplace
What security frameworks and identity management strategies (such as MFA or Conditional Access) do you implement to protect enterprise data?
Approach
- Clarify what is being asked and what a complete answer contains.
- State your assumptions explicitly before working the problem.
- Say what you would check first and why it is the highest-information step.
- 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 your approach to troubleshooting a performance bottleneck on a VMware vSphere cluster hosting critical
Medium · Cloud & Virtualization Engineering
Explain your approach to troubleshooting a performance bottleneck on a VMware vSphere cluster hosting critical enterprise databases.
Approach
- Establish what changed and when, before forming any theory.
- Pick a bisection that eliminates candidates whichever way it turns out.
- Check the instrumentation before believing the symptom.
- Separate the trigger from the cause; the deploy is rarely the bug.
Follow-up
- What would you look at first, and what would it rule out?
- How would you tell a cause from a coincidence here?
Suggested practice checklist
Built from the rounds and topics Pri Technology candidates report.
Day 1 — Map the Pri Technology loop
- Write out the reported sequence: Initial Screening, Technical Assessment, Client-Facing Interviews.
- 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 3 reported rounds, with the weakest marked.
Day 2 — Work ServiceNow Development
- Spend the session on ServiceNow Development, which Pri Technology candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in ServiceNow Development and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in ServiceNow Development.
Day 3 — Work Azure Systems Engineering
- Spend the session on Azure Systems Engineering, which Pri Technology candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Azure Systems Engineering and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Azure Systems Engineering.
Day 4 — Work Cloud Infrastructure (Azure)
- Spend the session on Cloud Infrastructure (Azure), which Pri Technology candidates report being tested on.
- Write one worked example in Cloud Infrastructure (Azure) and time yourself on it.
Deliverable: One timed worked example in Cloud Infrastructure (Azure).
Day 5 — Answer out loud: Cloud & Virtualization Engineering
- Answer aloud, timed: How do you design a highly available hybrid cloud architecture using Azure and on-premises VMware environments?
- Answer aloud, timed: Describe a scenario where you had to migrate a legacy, on-premises workload to Azure with minimal downtime. What was your strategy?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Cloud & Virtualization Engineering question(s), under time.
Day 6 — Answer out loud: Enterprise Platform Development (ServiceNow)
- Answer aloud, timed: Explain how you would design and implement a custom integration between ServiceNow and an external third-party system using REST APIs.
- Answer aloud, timed: How do you manage update sets across multi-developer environments to prevent collisions and ensure smooth deployments to production?
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Enterprise Platform Development (ServiceNow) question(s), under time.
Day 7 — Answer out loud: Systems Engineering & Modern Workplace
- Answer aloud, timed: How do you configure tenant-wide security and compliance policies in Microsoft 365 while maintaining a seamless user experience?
- Answer aloud, timed: Describe your experience using PowerShell to automate repetitive administrative tasks across Microsoft 365 and Active Directory.
Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Systems Engineering & Modern Workplace question(s), under time.
Behavioural preparation
Behavioural rounds judge the decision you made and what it cost.
Describe your experience using PowerShell to automate repetitive administrative tasks across Microsoft 365 and
Medium · Systems Engineering & Modern Workplace
Describe your experience using PowerShell to automate repetitive administrative tasks across Microsoft 365 and Active Directory.
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- 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 time when you had to explain a highly complex technical solution to a non-technical business stakeh
Medium · Behavioral & Client Consultation
Describe a time when you had to explain a highly complex technical solution to a non-technical business stakeholder. How did you ensure alignment?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- 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 faced conflicting requirements from different team leads. How did you prioritize your
Medium · Behavioral & Client Consultation
Tell me about a time you faced conflicting requirements from different team leads. How did you prioritize your deliverables?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- 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 a critical production system went down. What immediate steps did you take to resolv
Medium · Behavioral & Client Consultation
Describe a situation where a critical production system went down. What immediate steps did you take to resolve the issue, and how did you communicate during the crisis?
Approach
- Pick a story where you made the decision, not one where you watched it.
- State the situation in two sentences and spend the rest on the reasoning.
- Give the blast radius: what could have broken, and what you measured.
- 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?