Software Engineer Interview Prep Podcast

Prabuddha Ganegoda
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Courses
  • Updated Weekly

Ace your Software Engineer interviews with confidence. This podcast helps you organize your thinking, strengthen problem-solving skills, and prepare effectively for real technical interviews. Topics covered include: Programming (Java & Python) Data Structures & Algorithms System Design AI for Software Engineers Interview strategies & mindset Whether you're targeting Big Tech, startups, or senior engineering roles, each episode helps you think clearly, solve better, and perform at your best.

  1. Jun 8

    Agentic coding Session 3 - Live Problem-Solving Under Pressure

    The mental model and the toolkit come together here. We cover managing a session in real time — when to course-correct, when to clear and restart — the five failure patterns that quietly tank your work and how to fix each, and a complete worked problem run end to end: explore, plan, implement in a fresh session, verify with tests, and review with an adversarial subagent. Plus scaling techniques and exactly how to demonstrate competence when someone is watching you code.

    22 min

  2. Jun 8

    Agentic coding Session 2 — Configuration & Extension Mastery

    This is where the deep technical interview questions live. Claude Code has five extension points — CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, subagents, and MCP — and knowing which to reach for is a core competency. We break down each one: why CLAUDE.md is always-on context you must keep lean, how skills load knowledge on demand and why the description field decides everything, when hooks give you deterministic guarantees, how subagents isolate heavy work in their own context, and how MCP and CLI tools connect the outside world. Ends with the decision framework that ties them all together.

    20 min

  3. Jun 8

    Agentic coding Session 1 — The Agentic Mental Model

    The Agentic Mental Model: what "agentic" means and the loop, the context window as the governing constraint, explore→plan→implement→commit, verification, and precise prompting. Most engineers meet AI coding tools as a smarter autocomplete. Claude Code is something else: an agent that explores, plans, and writes code on its own while you direct and review. This opening episode rewires how you think about the tool. We unpack what "agentic" actually means, why the context window is the one constraint that explains every best practice, the explore-plan-implement-commit workflow, and the discipline of verification — giving the agent a check it can run so it self-corrects. The foundation for everything that follows, and for any interview that asks how you think with an AI agent.

    24 min

  4. Season 1, Episode 1 Trailer

    S1E1 [Preview] - The Job Changed While You Were Sleeping

    SEASON 1 — "The Shift" Listen to - S1E1 Interview an engineer who transitioned from backend → AI engineer. Their story IS the season premise.

    2 min

  5. Jun 6

    S1E1 - The Job Changed While You Were Sleeping

    SEASON 1 — "The Shift" Interview an engineer who transitioned from backend → AI engineer. Their story IS the season premise.

    50 min

  6. May 22

    The Behavioral Round - STAR/CARL

    The behavioral round quietly decides more FAANG loops than coding or system design — and most engineers spend 300 hours on LeetCode and 45 minutes preparing for it. In this deep dive, we unpack: – Why FAANG weights behavioral signal so heavily (leveling, risk, culture fit)– The STAR framework, dissected letter by letter, with the failure modes at each step– CARL and why the Learning layer is the punchline, not an afterthought– How to choose between STAR and CARL in real time based on the verb in the question– Building a 12-story bank that covers 14 behavioral dimensions– Company-specific calibration: Amazon's Leadership Principles, Google's Googleyness, Meta's core values, Apple's craft focus, Netflix's candor culture– The five anti-patterns that quietly tank candidates who think they did well– Walkthroughs of ten of the most common behavioral questions with model approaches– The five shifts that separate an L5 answer from an L6 answer Whether you're prepping for your first FAANG loop or trying to figure out why your last one downleveled you, this episode gives you the structure, the frameworks, and the homework to fix it.

    46 min

  7. May 17

    Kafka Architecture and Triage Production Scenarios

    Every scenario includes: Real-world context setting the stageThe interview question as it would be askedA structured model answerExact configuration parameters with values and reasoning

    1 hr

  8. May 17

    System Design Interview: Payment Settlement Batch Processing

    Design a batch processing system for end-of-day payment settlement at a payments company that processes 50 million transactions per day. The system must net merchant positions, calculate fees, and initiate fund transfers to merchant bank accounts within a strict bank cutoff window. Walk me through your design, covering reliability, scalability, and how you'd handle failures. Key Takeaways The outbox pattern is the canonical solution to the dual-write problem. Know it cold.Partition keys define ordering and parallelism — choose with intention, usually around the natural aggregation boundary (here, merchant ID).Throttling must be distributed when you have multiple workers — Redis-backed buckets or a sidecar.Idempotency is non-negotiable in payments. Design for at-least-once and dedupe.Retries are tiered: in-process for transient, delay-queue for slower-resolving, DLQ for terminal.Backpressure beats dropping — use Kafka lag as your buffer when downstream is slow.Reconciliation closes the loop — you don't know it worked until ground truth confirms.Corrections are new events — never rewrite history in a financial system.

    10 min
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Trailer

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5
out of 5
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About

Ace your Software Engineer interviews with confidence. This podcast helps you organize your thinking, strengthen problem-solving skills, and prepare effectively for real technical interviews. Topics covered include: Programming (Java & Python) Data Structures & Algorithms System Design AI for Software Engineers Interview strategies & mindset Whether you're targeting Big Tech, startups, or senior engineering roles, each episode helps you think clearly, solve better, and perform at your best.

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