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 |
Typical questions — and the follow-up that comes next
Engineering interviews are won on the second question — the one that checks whether you built what the résumé says. Each question below comes with that second question.
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.
Read next
- STAR Method Answers That Survive Follow-ups
- Tell Me About Yourself (Freshers) + 3 Follow-ups
- Is ChatGPT a Good Mock Interviewer?
- How the scorecard works — six competencies, each tied to a quote from your transcript.
Practise for another role
Last updated · Written by the Mentari team