SDE Project and Resume Deep Dive

Requirements

• Structure: the first 20 minutes of an SDE II phone screen, which mixes a walk through your resume with a pair of Leadership Principles questions.
• Describe the technology stack that was chosen for your project.
• Talk through the trade-offs that lay behind those choices.
• Lay out the business logic.
• Point out exactly which part of the work belonged to you personally.

Notes

• Those 20 minutes also hold the two LP questions, so it is not 20 minutes of technical talk followed by its own separate behavioral portion.
• After that, the screen gives 40 minutes to coding.

Practice outline

• State the business goal, follow the relevant request or data flow, and then tie each technology decision to a specific constraint. Set one reasonable alternative beside it and describe the trade-off that settled the choice.
• Separate the design, implementation and operations you handled yourself from what the team did. Frame the experience as situation, task, action and result, and cite only outcomes or measurements you can back up. Keep the technical explanations brief enough that time remains for the LP questions in the shared opening block.

Preparation

• Within 15 minutes, sketch the components and data flow of one project. Mark two technology choices on it, with an alternative for each, along with the business behavior and the components you owned yourself.
• Record yourself explaining a project for five minutes, then respond to one challenge of a technical choice and one question on ownership. Replay the recording looking for numbers with no support, vague claims made on behalf of the team, and trade-offs that are missing.