Software Engineering Practices Topics
Covers industry-standard practices for building maintainable, high-quality software, including code quality, maintainability, documentation, and effective technical communication within engineering teams.
Technical Excellence and Engineering Practices
Practices and cultural habits that maintain high engineering standards across teams. Topics include establishing and enforcing code review standards, testing strategies, continuous integration and delivery practices, documentation norms, knowledge sharing, learning culture, and measurable engineering health metrics. Also includes approaches to mentor engineers, build technical competency across the team, and structure learning programs that raise the whole organization.
Code Quality and Technical Debt Management
Covers practices for writing readable, maintainable, and correct code and for managing long term code health. Topics include error handling, automated and manual testing, code review practices, refactoring and optimization, style and readability, continuous improvement, identification and quantification of technical debt, prioritization of pay down activities versus feature delivery, and measuring the impact of remediation efforts. Candidates should be able to explain decision criteria for when refactoring is worth the investment and how to institutionalize improvements.
Iterative Problem Solving and Feedback
Evaluates how a candidate breaks larger algorithmic or implementation tasks into small, testable steps and incorporates feedback while coding. Candidates should describe an incremental implementation strategy, running tests or examples after each logical section, validating intermediate outputs, and progressively improving or refactoring code when new requirements or feedback arrive. Interviewers look for evidence of test driven thinking, modularization, risk aware trade offs between quick iteration and correctness, clear communication of intermediate assumptions, and a collaborative attitude toward feedback.
Cross Team API Design
Focuses on designing programmer facing interfaces and runtime data that are easy for nonprogrammers to use. Topics include designing clear and stable APIs for designers artists and audio engineers, creating editor tooling and parameter surfaces, exposing safe scriptable hooks, documenting usage patterns, providing sensible defaults and guard rails, and planning for extensibility and versioning. Also covers usability testing with content teams, performance considerations for designer workflows, and how to iterate on API ergonomics while maintaining internal code quality.
Code Review and Technical Leadership
Providing technical leadership through code review and related practices such as mentoring establishing coding standards running design reviews and improving team quality over time. Candidates should discuss how they give constructive feedback in pull requests define and enforce standards through automation and continuous integration balance delivery speed with long term maintainability drive refactors and onboarding and use review processes to raise the overall technical bar while keeping feedback actionable and respectful.