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University of North Texas Software Engineer Interview Guide

University of North Texas Software Engineer interview guide: reported rounds, questions and how candidates describe the process.

The 60-second brief

As a Software Engineer at the University of North Texas, you play a vital role in designing, building, and maintaining the enterprise-grade applications and digital platforms that drive higher education operations. Your work directly impacts tens of thousands of students, faculty, and administrative staff across the system by ensuring that core academic and business systems operate securely and efficiently. Whether you are modernizing enterprise resource planning systems, integrating student information databases, or optimizing web portals, your contributions form the technological backbone of the institution. This position sits at the intersection of complex technical architecture and mission-driven public service.

This guide is scoped to a Software Engineer candidate at University of North Texas.

Focus areas

  • ERP Systems
  • SQL
  • PeopleSoft

The University of North Texas interview process

University of North Texas candidates report 3 rounds over 3-5 weeks. The stages below are what candidates describe, not a published process.

Application Review

The search committee reviews your application to determine if you will be selected for an interview.

What to demonstrate

  • The search committee reviews your application to determine if you will be selected for an interview
  • Depth in ERP Systems

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.

Panel Interview

A primary evaluation round with the Hiring Manager and a peer, focusing on technical skills and behavioral questions.

What to demonstrate

  • A primary evaluation round with the Hiring Manager and a peer
  • Focusing on technical skills and behavioral questions

How to prepare

  • Answer aloud and timed: Can you explain how you would modify existing software to correct errors or adapt it to new hardware constraints?
  • Answer aloud and timed: What steps do you take to design and execute software system testing and validation procedures?

Meet the Team

A casual setting where finalists meet potential colleagues to assess cultural alignment and collaborative potential.

What to demonstrate

  • A casual setting where finalists meet potential colleagues to assess cultural alignment and collaborative potential
  • Depth in ERP Systems

How to prepare

  • Answer aloud and timed: How do you ensure data security and maintain compliance standards when configuring new system features or patches?
  • Answer aloud and timed: Walk us through your process for analyzing user needs and determining the technical feasibility of a design within time and cost constraints.

Where candidates lose points

Highlight your customer service mindset

Emphasize that you view university departments and students as your primary stakeholders, focusing on how your technical solutions improve their daily experiences.

Be prepared to discuss your documentation habits

Interviewers highly value clean technical documentation; be ready to share examples of how you organize and maintain support materials for complex systems.

Connect your stories to institutional values

Weave references to collaboration, continuous learning, and courageous integrity into your behavioral answers to resonate with the leadership team's culture.

Questions & practice

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.

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?

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.

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?

Archive a resource graph without breaking live references or recursing

Medium · graph traversal · topological order · tenant isolation

Resources reference other resources within a tenant; for the largest tenant the reference table holds up to 2,000,000 nodes and 8,000,000 edges. Archiving a resource must archive everything reachable from it that nothing outside the set still references, refuse when a live external referrer exists, and terminate when references form cycles, which they legitimately do. Produce the archive order and the refusal list, targeting O(V+E). Say what stops the traversal crossing a tenant boundary, and why recursion is the wrong control structure at this size.

Approach

  1. Load the subgraph with the tenant predicate on both endpoints of the edge, not only on the side you started from. Scoping the left table alone is the classic cross-tenant leak: one mis-entered edge then pulls another tenant's resources into the traversal and, worse, into the archive.
  2. Traverse iteratively with an explicit stack. A 2,000,000-node graph can hold a chain deep enough to exhaust a native stack in the low tens of thousands of frames, and that failure is a process crash rather than an error you can return.
  3. Treat cycles as data rather than corruption: compute strongly connected components with Tarjan in O(V+E) using its own explicit stack, then condense. The condensation is a DAG, so a topological order over it gives the archive order, and every member of a component archives in one transaction because no order within a cycle is valid.
  4. Decide refusals with reverse edges. A candidate is archivable only if every in-edge originates inside the candidate set, so build the transpose or count in-degrees restricted to the visited set, and emit each blocked resource with the id of the external referrer, which is the only part of the answer an operator can act on.

Follow-up

  • The graph is read in one query and the archive writes a minute later. What can change in between, and how do you make the write safe?
  • The candidate set is 400,000 resources. Is that one transaction, and if not, what does a half-finished archive look like to a reader?

How do you approach writing complex Oracle SQL queries or optimizing database structures for performance?

Medium · Technical and Domain Expertise

Approach

  1. Name the grain you start from and join outward from it.
  2. Check whether any join is one-to-many before aggregating, or the sums inflate.
  3. Say which index the query would use, and what makes it unusable.
  4. 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?

Write the update path that detects a concurrent edit

Medium · optimistic concurrency · transactional outbox · audit history

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

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

What experience do you have working with enterprise client-server applications like PeopleSoft or Salesforce?

Medium · Technical and Domain Expertise

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

Can you explain how you would modify existing software to correct errors or adapt it to new hardware constrain

Medium · Technical and Domain Expertise

Can you explain how you would modify existing software to correct errors or adapt it to new hardware constraints?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

What steps do you take to design and execute software system testing and validation procedures?

Medium · Technical and Domain Expertise

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you ensure data security and maintain compliance standards when configuring new system features or patc

Medium · Technical and Domain Expertise

How do you ensure data security and maintain compliance standards when configuring new system features or patches?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

Walk us through your process for analyzing user needs and determining the technical feasibility of a design wi

Medium · System Analysis and Problem-Solving

Walk us through your process for analyzing user needs and determining the technical feasibility of a design within time and cost constraints.

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you approach creating, organizing, and maintaining technical documentation for complex software systems

Medium · System Analysis and Problem-Solving

How do you approach creating, organizing, and maintaining technical documentation for complex software systems?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

What strategies do you use to prioritize your workload when managing multiple competing deadlines and IT proje

Medium · System Analysis and Problem-Solving

What strategies do you use to prioritize your workload when managing multiple competing deadlines and IT projects?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

What recommendations or improvements would you make to modernize or streamline our current web portals and ent

Medium · Process Improvement and Innovation

What recommendations or improvements would you make to modernize or streamline our current web portals and enterprise applications?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you stay curious about new technologies and apply lessons learned from past project challenges to futur

Medium · Process Improvement and Innovation

How do you stay curious about new technologies and apply lessons learned from past project challenges to future initiatives?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

Can you share an example of a time you automated an administrative business process to increase operational ef

Medium · Process Improvement and Innovation

Can you share an example of a time you automated an administrative business process to increase operational efficiency?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you approach evaluating customer satisfaction and gathering feedback after deploying a major software u

Medium · Process Improvement and Innovation

How do you approach evaluating customer satisfaction and gathering feedback after deploying a major software upgrade?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

What does a people-first, values-based culture mean to you in the context of delivering IT shared services?

Medium · Process Improvement and Innovation

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you handle troubleshooting recurring system issues and identifying the root cause of unexpected data or

Medium · System Analysis and Problem-Solving

How do you handle troubleshooting recurring system issues and identifying the root cause of unexpected data or process gaps?

Approach

  1. Establish what changed and when, before forming any theory.
  2. Pick a bisection that eliminates candidates whichever way it turns out.
  3. Check the instrumentation before believing the symptom.
  4. 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 University of North Texas candidates report.

Day 1 — Map the University of North Texas loop

  • Write out the reported sequence: Application Review, Panel Interview, Meet the Team.
  • 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 ERP Systems

  • Spend the session on ERP Systems, which University of North Texas candidates report being tested on.
  • Write one worked example in ERP Systems and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in ERP Systems.

Day 3 — Work SQL

  • Spend the session on SQL, which University of North Texas candidates report being tested on.
  • Write one worked example in SQL and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in SQL.

Day 4 — Work PeopleSoft

  • Spend the session on PeopleSoft, which University of North Texas candidates report being tested on.
  • Write one worked example in PeopleSoft and time yourself on it.

Deliverable: One timed worked example in PeopleSoft.

Day 5 — Answer out loud: Technical and Domain Expertise

  • Answer aloud, timed: What experience do you have working with enterprise client-server applications like PeopleSoft or Salesforce?
  • Answer aloud, timed: How do you approach writing complex Oracle SQL queries or optimizing database structures for performance?

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

Day 6 — Answer out loud: System Analysis and Problem-Solving

  • Answer aloud, timed: Walk us through your process for analyzing user needs and determining the technical feasibility of a design within time and cost constraints.
  • Answer aloud, timed: How do you handle troubleshooting recurring system issues and identifying the root cause of unexpected data or process gaps?

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

Day 7 — Answer out loud: Leadership and Collaboration

  • Answer aloud, timed: How do you approach conferring with systems analysts, engineers, and project stakeholders to define performance requirements and project limitations?
  • Answer aloud, timed: Can you describe an experience where you had to translate technical details into clear, understandable language for non-technical users?

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

Behavioural preparation

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

Describe a time when you had to evaluate multiple alternative solutions to a technical problem. How did you ch

Medium · System Analysis and Problem-Solving

Describe a time when you had to evaluate multiple alternative solutions to a technical problem. How did you choose the best path forward?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you approach conferring with systems analysts, engineers, and project stakeholders to define performanc

Medium · Leadership and Collaboration

How do you approach conferring with systems analysts, engineers, and project stakeholders to define performance requirements and project limitations?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

Can you describe an experience where you had to translate technical details into clear, understandable languag

Medium · Leadership and Collaboration

Can you describe an experience where you had to translate technical details into clear, understandable language for non-technical users?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you foster effective working relationships and collaborate successfully with both technical peers and d

Medium · Leadership and Collaboration

How do you foster effective working relationships and collaborate successfully with both technical peers and departmental stakeholders?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

What is your experience in training lower-level programmers, analysts, or end-users on specific tasks and syst

Medium · Leadership and Collaboration

What is your experience in training lower-level programmers, analysts, or end-users on specific tasks and system procedures?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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

How do you ensure high-quality customer service when responding to user support requests and technology assist

Medium · Leadership and Collaboration

How do you ensure high-quality customer service when responding to user support requests and technology assistance tickets?

Approach

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

Follow-up

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