Does Mentari run live coding rounds?

Mentari is a conversational interview, by voice or text. It covers project deep-dives, fundamentals, problem solving explained aloud, design trade-offs and behavioural questions. It is not an online judge — use it alongside a coding-practice site, not instead of one.

Will it ask about my own projects?

Yes. It reads your résumé before the interview and builds questions from your projects, internships and the claims you made — especially the ones stated vaguely, because those are what a real interviewer pushes on.

Can I practise for a specific company?

Yes. Name the company and role, and paste the job description if you have it. Mentari researches how that company interviews for the role and plans the round from what it finds.

AI mock interview

Software engineer mock interview

A software engineer mock interview on Mentari is a 20- or 40-minute conversation, by voice or text, with an AI interviewer that has read your résumé, the job description and how the company you named actually interviews. It walks through your projects, asks why you made each technical choice, pushes on what breaks at scale, and then scores six competencies — each one tied to a verbatim quote from your own answers.

Who this is for

Final-year students facing campus placements, freshers applying to service and product companies, and engineers with one to five years of experience changing jobs.

What a software engineer interview tests — and how Mentari runs each part

Round	What it tests	What Mentari does
Project deep-dive	Whether you built what your résumé says you built, and understood it	Picks the vaguest project line on your résumé and asks for the architecture, your part in it and the numbers
CS fundamentals	OOP, DBMS, operating systems, networking — explained, not recited	Asks you to explain a concept using your own project as the example
Problem solving	How you break down an unfamiliar problem aloud	Poses a problem, lets you think, then changes a constraint
Design and trade-offs	Judgement: why this database, this queue, this API shape	Asks what fails first at 10x load and what you would change
Behavioural / HR	Ownership, conflict, why this company	Checks your "why us" against its research on the company

You do not pick these from a menu. Mentari plans the round from your résumé, the job description and what it finds about how the company interviews for the role, so the mix changes with every session.

Typical questions — and the follow-up that comes next

Lists of interview questions are everywhere. What decides the interview is the second question: the one that checks whether the first answer was real. These are typical of the role, each paired with the follow-up a good interviewer asks.

01Walk me through the project you are proudest of.
Follow-up · Which part did you personally write, and what did you decide that a teammate disagreed with?
02Why did you choose that database for it?
Follow-up · What would have to change about the data for that choice to become wrong?
03How does your application handle a sudden 10x spike in traffic?
Follow-up · Which component falls over first, and how would you know before users told you?
04Explain the difference between a process and a thread.
Follow-up · Where in your own project did that difference actually matter?
05Tell me about a bug that took you more than a day to find.
Follow-up · What did you change in how you work so that class of bug is cheaper next time?
06How did you test this?
Follow-up · What is the one thing your tests would not have caught?
07Your résumé says you improved performance by 40%. How was that measured?
Follow-up · What was the baseline, and would someone else reproduce the same number?
08Why do you want to work here?
Follow-up · What do you know about how this team ships software that made you apply?

Where candidates lose marks

Describing what the team built instead of what you built.
Quoting a percentage on the résumé that you cannot explain how you measured.
Reciting a textbook definition and freezing when asked to apply it to your own code.
Going silent while thinking — interviewers score the reasoning they can hear.

What your scorecard shows

About thirty seconds after you finish, you get a score out of 10 and six competency scores. Each one is tied to a verbatim quote from your transcript, so you can see the exact answer that earned or cost the marks. How scoring works.

Competency	What it measures
Communication	Whether your answers were clear, direct and easy to follow — not your accent.
Technical depth	How well you understand the substance of the role, beyond definitions.
Problem solving	How you break down an unfamiliar problem and reason towards an answer.
Ownership	What you personally did, decided and were accountable for.
Structure	Whether your answers had a shape: context, action, result, and a point.
Company fit	Whether you showed the signals this particular company looks for in this role.

Practise for another role

Last updated 17 September 2026 · Written by the Mentari team