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Under Armour Software Engineer Interview Guide

Under Armour Software Engineer interview guide: reported rounds, questions and how candidates describe the process.

The 60-second brief

As a Software Engineer at Under Armour, you are at the intersection of high-performance athletic gear and digital innovation. This role is critical to building the platforms and applications that empower millions of athletes to track their performance, connect with global fitness communities, and optimize their training regimens. You are not just writing code; you are contributing to a digital ecosystem that extends the Under Armour brand beyond physical apparel into the daily lives of athletes worldwide. The work environment is fast-paced and demands a blend of technical precision and creative problem-solving. Whether you are working on mobile applications, cloud infrastructure, or data-driven backend services, your contributions directly impact product scalability and user experience.

This guide is scoped to a Software Engineer candidate at Under Armour.

Focus areas

Data Structures & Algorithms
Coding Interviews
System Design

The Under Armour interview process

Under Armour candidates report 5 rounds over 4-6 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

Recruiter Screening

Initial screening by a recruiter to assess your background and fit for the role.

What to demonstrate

Initial screening by a recruiter to assess your background and fit for the role
Depth in Data Structures & Algorithms

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 Assessments

A series of technical evaluations to assess your hard skills.

What to demonstrate

A series of technical evaluations to assess your hard skills
Depth in Data Structures & Algorithms

How to prepare

Answer aloud and timed: Tell me about a time you had to learn a new technology on the fly to meet a project deadline.
Answer aloud and timed: How do you handle feedback from stakeholders who may not have a technical background?

Behavioral Assessments

Evaluations focused on your behavioral skills and potential for growth within the organization.

What to demonstrate

Evaluations focused on your behavioral skills and potential for growth within the organization
Depth in Data Structures & Algorithms

How to prepare

Prepare three examples from your own work, each with a decision you made and an outcome you can quantify.
Re-read the description of the behavioral assessments above and write down what you would ask to confirm before it.

Multi-Round Interviews

Consecutive interviews with several team members to gain a comprehensive view of your capabilities.

What to demonstrate

Consecutive interviews with several team members to gain a comprehensive view of your capabilities
Depth in Data Structures & Algorithms

How to prepare

Answer aloud and timed: Explain the concept of dependency injection and why it is useful in large-scale applications.
Answer aloud and timed: How do you approach debugging a production issue that is difficult to replicate?

Final Decision-Making

The final phase where decisions are made regarding your candidacy.

What to demonstrate

The final phase where decisions are made regarding your candidacy
Depth in Data Structures & Algorithms

How to prepare

Answer aloud and timed: What is your experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks?
Answer aloud and timed: Can you explain how you ensure security in your code, specifically regarding data privacy?

Where candidates lose points

Research the Product

Use the Under Armour digital apps and services yourself. Having a user-level understanding of their products will make your answers much more compelling.

Practice your STAR stories

Ensure your behavioral answers are structured, concise, and focused on the actions you took and the results you achieved.

Be ready for technical depth

If you list a technology on your resume, be prepared to discuss it at a deep, architectural level.

Ask thoughtful questions

At the end of your interviews, ask about the team's current technical challenges or how they balance speed with code quality.

Questions & practice

What are the primary differences between [Language X] and [Language Y] in terms of memory management?

Medium · Technical and Domain Knowledge

Approach

Say what the runtime actually does before reasoning about the code.
Name what is shared across threads and what owns each piece of state.
Identify the window where an invariant is briefly untrue.
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?

How would you implement a function to find the shortest path in a weighted graph?

Medium · Coding and Problem Solving

Approach

Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
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?

Describe the data structures you would use to build a high-performance caching layer.

Medium · Coding and Problem Solving

Approach

Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
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?

Given a string, how would you determine if it is a palindrome using O(n) time complexity?

Medium · Coding and Problem Solving

Approach

Restate the input: its shape, its size, and what is guaranteed about it.
Name the brute-force solution and its complexity before improving on it.
Choose the data structure from the access pattern, not from familiarity.
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?

How do you approach designing a system that needs to handle high concurrent traffic?

Medium · Coding and Problem Solving

Approach

Say what the runtime actually does before reasoning about the code.
Name what is shared across threads and what owns each piece of state.
Identify the window where an invariant is briefly untrue.
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?

Explain how you would optimize a slow-performing database query.

Medium · Coding and Problem Solving

Approach

Name the grain you start from and join outward from it.
Check whether any join is one-to-many before aggregating, or the sums inflate.
Say which index the query would use, and what makes it unusable.
Handle the rows that do not match: that is usually the actual question.

Follow-up

How does the query change if that join becomes one-to-many?
What happens to this when the table is ten times larger?

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

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.
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.
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.
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.

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?

Explain the concept of dependency injection and why it is useful in large-scale applications.

Medium · Technical and Domain Knowledge

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?

Can you explain how you ensure security in your code, specifically regarding data privacy?

Medium · Technical and Domain Knowledge

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 approach debugging a production issue that is difficult to replicate?

Medium · Technical and Domain Knowledge

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 Under Armour candidates report.

Day 1 — Map the Under Armour loop

Write out the reported sequence: Recruiter Screening, Technical Assessments, Behavioral Assessments, Multi-Round Interviews, Final Decision-Making.
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 5 reported rounds, with the weakest marked.

Day 2 — Work Data Structures & Algorithms

Spend the session on Data Structures & Algorithms, which Under Armour candidates report being tested on.
Write one worked example in Data Structures & Algorithms and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Data Structures & Algorithms.

Day 3 — Work Coding Interviews

Spend the session on Coding Interviews, which Under Armour candidates report being tested on.
Write one worked example in Coding Interviews and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in Coding Interviews.

Day 4 — Work System Design

Spend the session on System Design, which Under Armour candidates report being tested on.
Write one worked example in System Design and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in System Design.

Day 5 — Answer out loud: Behavioral and Cultural Fit

Answer aloud, timed: Why do you want to work for Under Armour specifically?
Answer aloud, timed: Can you describe a time you had to handle a conflict within your team?

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Behavioral and Cultural Fit question(s), under time.

Day 6 — Answer out loud: Technical and Domain Knowledge

Answer aloud, timed: What are the primary differences between [Language X] and [Language Y] in terms of memory management?
Answer aloud, timed: Explain the concept of dependency injection and why it is useful in large-scale applications.

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Technical and Domain Knowledge question(s), under time.

Day 7 — Answer out loud: Coding and Problem Solving

Answer aloud, timed: How would you implement a function to find the shortest path in a weighted graph?
Answer aloud, timed: Explain how you would optimize a slow-performing database query.

Deliverable: Spoken answers to 2 reported Coding and Problem Solving question(s), under time.