IBM Software Engineer Interview Questions
225+ questions from real IBM Software Engineer interviews, reported by candidates.
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Madam C.J. Walker is historically renowned for becoming the first African-American businesswoman in America. One of her business plans involving the sale of cosmetics and perfumes for women is a...
Get Minimum Cost
### Problem Overview - Insert exactly one integer into a 0-based array of positive integers to minimize the array’s defined cost; return the minimum possible cost. - Input: arr[n]; Constraints: 2 ≤ n
The first question took me around 5 minutes to do. The second one hit me in a large blind spot, and no question on Leetcode will prepare you for it. Putting this here as a potential warning. Even with
I have an interview in a few days for the IBM software developer 91689 position. It is a 45 minute with a hiring. The problem is they never gave me any OAs or any other behavioral tests even though an
Ibm sde intern
I had my first interview about 2 weeks ago, labeled as a “Blitz” interview. It was a 30-minute session that was mostly a resume deep dive with some behavioral questions. It went really well, and based
Ive applied for IBM 7 times over the last 6 months. I have been invited to do online assessments, EVERY SINGLE TIME. I nailed all previous attempts and passed all unit tests 100% for mid-level, senior
I had interviewed for the IBM app developer position and I had the first interview, which I got after taking the coding skills assessment. The first interview was just behavioral and spoke on why IBM,
IBM Canada Internship Technical Phone Screen Overview
After submitting your resume, the co-op program will send you an online assessment (OA) confirmation link. Be sure to click it! Then you'll get this HackerRank question, two questions in one hour. The
The first question was to flip an array in place, which could be completed in a few minutes; the second question was surprisingly to write front-end code. The HTML was given, and you had to write CSS
The link I received was very strange; it was supposedly for a frontend engineer position, 60 minutes for two questions, one coding and one CSS. The coding question was very simple: a best-time buy and
The interview lasted 60 minutes and consisted of two questions. The first question was extremely simple; I finished it in one minute after reading it, and I have absolutely no recollection of it 😬 Sor
Problem Statement Given an integer array `nums`, you are tasked with sorting it in non-decreasing order using the minimum number of specific operations. If sorting is impossible, return -1. **The
Q1. In a school, there are n students who want to participate in an academic decathlon. The teacher wants to select the maximum number of students possible. Each student has...
My Interview Experience for the Application Developer Role at IBM || Not Selected || Dec 2024
My interview experience for the Application Developer role at IBM with CTC of 4.5 LPA began with a notification from our college TPO, announcing that IBM would be hiring the...
IBM conducted an on-campus recruitment drive for the ASE position, which consisted of six rounds: 1. First Round (Online Test): This was a HackerRank test where candidates were required...
Advice for Legacy App Migration
Looking for some advice regarding a legacy app migration we are preparing for at work. Unfortunately we aren't a large dev team and there isn't a lot of deep dev knowledge. No one has any experience w
IBM India visited our campus for a campus recruitment drive in the month of September 2025, and I am sharing my interview experience with the company below.OverviewOnline ...
IBM On Campus Drive 2025
I recently attended the IBM On-Campus Drive (September 2025) and would like to share my experience.? EligibilityOpen to female candidates from all branches.Conducted acros...
IBM India on-campus interview experience 2025
I attended the IBM India pooled drive in August at Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu for the role of Software Developer.Eligibility:Only female candidates from B.E/B.Tech (CSE, IT, I...
Round 1: Online Test (HackerRank)Format: 25 MCQs on Computer Science fundamentals and 3 DSA coding questions.Platform: HackerRankRound 2: Online Test (HackerRank)Format: S...
What IBM Looks for in Software Engineer Interviews
IBM Software Engineer interviews are calibrated against the level and scope expected of the role. Across 225+ verified candidate reports on LeakCode, the consistent signals interviewers look for: clear problem decomposition before coding, explicit complexity reasoning, structured handling of edge cases, and the ability to articulate trade-offs between two reasonable approaches.
The discriminator between candidates who advance and candidates who do not is rarely the final correctness of the solution. It is the path to the solution: did you ask clarifying questions, did you state your approach before coding, did you handle edge cases without prompting, and did you communicate your reasoning throughout. Reports tagged "no hire" frequently cite a working solution with poor communication; reports tagged "strong hire" cite clear thinking even when the final solution was incomplete.
How To Use This Question Set
Real interview reports are a calibration tool, not a memorization target. Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months; memorizing exact problems risks misleading you when the interviewer uses a variant. The high-leverage use: identify the patterns that appear repeatedly in IBM Software Engineer reports, practice those patterns on similar (not identical) problems, and use the reports to understand the interviewer's typical follow-up depth.
Filter the questions below by round type, difficulty, and recency. Focus first on reports from the past 6-12 months; older reports may reference questions that have since rotated out of IBM's pool. Reports tagged with quantified difficulty (e.g., "medium-hard") are higher-signal than reports without difficulty tags.
Round-by-Round Expectations
IBM Software Engineer loops typically span 4-6 rounds across phone screens and on-site or virtual on-site interviews. The structure varies by company: some run 1 recruiter screen + 1 technical phone + 3-4 on-site rounds; others run 1 recruiter screen + 1 OA + 4-5 on-site rounds. The recruiter screen is logistics and culture-light; the technical phone screen is medium-difficulty coding; the on-site loop covers coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral rounds.
Each round is designed to surface a specific signal. Coding rounds: correctness, code quality, complexity reasoning, communication. System design rounds: requirements clarification, design judgment, operational thinking. Behavioral rounds: ownership scope, leadership, ambiguity tolerance, conflict navigation. Strong candidates explicitly hit each signal dimension out loud during the round; weak candidates focus only on solving the prompt.
Common Interview Mistakes At This Combination
Reports tagged "no hire" at IBM Software Engineer commonly cite: jumping into code without clarifying requirements, coding silently for 10+ minutes without verbalizing approach, missing edge cases (empty input, single element, very large input, overflow), and producing a working solution that the candidate cannot explain or refactor when probed. Strong candidates avoid these patterns by following a consistent template: clarify, verbalize approach, code with narration, test with examples.
Behavioral and design rounds have their own failure modes. Behavioral: stories that use "we" instead of "I" diluting individual signal, stories with no quantified outcome, defensiveness when probed about failure. Design: not asking clarifying questions, not stating requirements out loud, designing for a single server when the prompt clearly implies scale, ignoring operational concerns (deployment, monitoring, rollback). These show up in roughly half of IBM Software Engineer interview retrospectives on LeakCode.
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