General SDE2 Interview Guide
Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026
Evidence-backed preparation playbook for General SDE2 interviews. 147 reported questions, top topics, difficulty breakdown, and a free assessment.
2-5 years
Most reported exp
Rounds reported
Screening 53qScenario 32qSystem Design 28qTechnical 28qHR 6q
Topics most frequently reported
✓Data Engineering / Architecture
4 questions · 3%
✓React / State Management
3 questions · 2%
✓TypeScript / Type System
3 questions · 2%
·AWS / S3
3 questions · 2%
·Node.js / Architecture
3 questions · 2%
·Data Engineering / Data Modeling
3 questions · 2%
Free · 10 minutes
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Top Questions — Ranked by Community Votes
These 6 questions appeared most in General SDE2 reports. Master these first.
General
Medium
Technical round
2-5 years
Your AWS Lambda function runs fine in testing but times out in production on the first invocation. Why?
↑ 83 upvotes · 51 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Medium
System Design round
2-5 years
How do you implement dark mode in a React app that persists across refreshes, respects OS preference, and allows manual override?
↑ 82 upvotes · 20 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Hard
System Design round
4-7 years
You have a users table with 100M rows. You need to add a full-text search on the bio column (free text). Show how to implement this in PostgreSQL.
↑ 80 upvotes · 38 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Hard
Technical round
3-6 years
Your Next.js app shows 'Loading...' forever on first visit but works fine on refresh. What's happening?
↑ 80 upvotes · 18 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Hard
System Design round
5-8 years
You're building a WebSocket server in Node.js that needs to broadcast messages to 50,000 concurrent connections. A naive broadcast loops through all 50,000 and calls socket.send(). What's wrong with this and how do you fix it?
↑ 79 upvotes · 47 engineers asked this · SDE2
General
Hard
Screening round
4-8 years
Explain PostgreSQL's MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control). How does it enable concurrent reads and writes without blocking?
↑ 79 upvotes · 37 engineers asked this · SDE2
See all 147 questions →
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Frequently asked questions
How hard is the General SDE2 interview?
Mostly Hard difficulty based on 147 reported questions. Most questions cover Data Engineering / Architecture, React / State Management, TypeScript / Type System.
What topics does General ask SDE2s?
Top reported topics: Data Engineering / Architecture (4 questions), React / State Management (3 questions), TypeScript / Type System (3 questions), AWS / S3 (3 questions), Node.js / Architecture (3 questions).
How many rounds does General have for SDE2?
Reported rounds: System Design, Technical, Screening, Scenario, HR.
What experience level does General hire SDE2s at?
Most reported: 2-5 years and 3-6 years.