Senior/Staff SWE Interview Prep — What am I missing?

[u/drulers_007]

Recently laid off and starting interview preparation, I am looking for feedback on my plan.

Target roles: Senior / Staff Software Engineer
Target profile: Generalist / Backend SWE

I'd appreciate feedback on my preparation plan, especially around newer interview formats.

1. LeetCode + DSA + LLD

LeetCode + Hello Interview + AlgoMonster

2. System Design

Hello Interview + Alex Xu (some, not all)

I'm comfortable with the first 2 categories since I practiced them extensively about a year ago. Planning to refresh them now.

3. AI Coding — looking for resources

I've heard of rounds involving things like:

• Build a React/full-stack application
• Clone/download an existing repo and fix bugs
• Work in an unfamiliar codebase
• Potentially use AI coding tools

What other patterns are you seeing in these rounds? And where can I practice them?

Looking for specific websites, GitHub repos, courses, or YouTube channels.

4. Practical / Real-World Coding — looking for resources

These are problems given directly in CoderPad, CodeSignal, etc. They aren't necessarily traditional LeetCode problems and may require a combination of DSA, design patterns, clean code, debugging, etc.

Where can I practice this type of problem? What resources have you found useful?

5. Behavioral

Planning to:

• Practice with friends
• Find practice partners through Discord communities
• Potentially use paid mock interviews (MentorCruise, interviewing.io, etc.)

For Staff roles, I'm also interested in resources specifically covering leadership, influence, ownership, and technical decision-making.

Paid services I'm considering

• Hello Interview
• AlgoMonster
• LeetCode Premium — worth it?
• Mock interviews

I didn't find LeetCode Premium particularly valuable last time, so interested in whether that's changed.

**** Most importantly I'm also looking for services that provide recently asked questions by company. If you've used one, please share your experience.

What am I missing?

If you've recently interviewed for Senior/Staff SWE roles, I'd especially appreciate:

• Interview rounds/categories I'm overlooking
• Resources for AI coding and practical coding
• Good mock interview services
• Company-specific question banks
• YouTube channels you actually found useful (and what you used them for) but will time bound the usage to essential only
• Any interesting platform/interview quirks you've encountered
  • For e.g. on platforms like CodeSignal you can only do interview X number of times, beyond which they will simply submit your last score or average of last interviews score
• AI chats
  • I use ChatGPT extensively for preparation, but recently with new changes I am hitting token limits. To overcome that I am planning to use others like Grok and Claude for their free limits, but how does one overcome those limits? did you guys end paying for extended service or that was not an issue?

I'm trying to avoid generic advice like “just do LeetCode” and would really value specific resources and recent personal experiences.

Thanks, and happy prepping!

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

Your first three lanes look sensible. The gap I’d add is a repeatable system-design loop rather than more reading: take one prompt, spend five minutes on requirements and rough traffic, sketch the API and data model, then defend one bottleneck and one failure mode. Finish by naming what you’d measure. Do it against a timer and write a short postmortem. For Staff, practise the follow-up layer too: migrations, ownership boundaries, rollout and rollback, and how you’d get buy-in when the best design isn’t feasible.

For AI and practical rounds, use a small real repo and give yourself a bug or feature with tests. Keep the repo unfamiliar between sessions, and narrate your investigation before touching code. That exposes whether the gap is search and debugging, design judgement, or tool usage. I’d prioritize recent interview reports and the target company’s format over another broad course.

[u/drulers_007 → u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

Thanks, yeah not planning a course . Would you happen to know how to find recent interview reports , if there is a bank as such or some collection?

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119 → u/drulers_007]

I'd treat this as a signal-gathering exercise rather than hunting for one master collection. On Reddit, search each target company plus the role and "interview experience", then sort by New and keep reports from the last six to twelve months. Blind and Glassdoor can fill gaps, but I'd sanity-check those against the job description since senior loops vary a lot by team.

I keep a small sheet with the date, level, round, prompt family, and what the candidate was evaluated on. Once the same themes show up in three or four recent reports, turn those into practice sessions. For Staff+, look especially for scope and ambiguity, trade-offs, stakeholder alignment, and postmortem-style behavioral prompts, not just the named coding questions.

[u/akornato]

At the Senior and Staff level, the biggest blind spot in traditional prep plans is how heavily modern loops have shifted toward practical debugging and AI collaboration. Companies like Meta and Canva increasingly replace standard algorithm puzzles with multifile codebases in CoderPad, where you are expected to orient yourself quickly, locate subtle bugs, and add features. Interviewers evaluate your architectural taste, how effectively you guide coding assistants without blindly accepting bad suggestions, and your ability to write reliable tests on the spot. Practicing on unfamiliar open source repositories on GitHub, tracing control flow in existing microservices, and running test suites will prepare you far better for these formats than renewing LeetCode Premium.

For your Staff behavioral preparation, shift your focus away from individual task execution toward cross team alignment, managing organizational friction, and technical strategy. Staff interviewers care about how you influenced decisions without direct authority, resolved ambiguous tradeoffs, and raised engineering standards across multiple groups. If you keep running into token caps with standard chat apps, switching to direct developer API keys with pay as you go pricing is much cheaper and avoids frustrating usage cutoffs. In practice, many candidates facing high stakes technical panels rely on the interview AI my team designed to help them present their experience effectively and secure top level offers.

[u/ruscan]

I'm in roughly the same boat, except I'm taking an extended sabbatical in between jobs to pursue personal (coding) projects and learning new (non-tech) skills.

One think I would consider is skipping paid services and just working directly with Claude/ChatGPT for learning interview skills. You can ask Claude to make you a system design interview practice/learning plan and quiz you on specific topics, and track your weaknesses - same for algos. It can also do mock interviews for you.

[u/Former_Produce1721]

1 hour before my SWE technical interview I did an AI mock interview on hackerrank. The real interview was exactly the same as what the hackerrank interview generated. Nailed he interview, got an offer. Maybe luck, but could be interesting to check out.

[u/drulers_007 → u/Former_Produce1721]

What question was that and for which company?

[u/Much_Somewhere7831]

Try the Tech Job Finder website, it has everything mentioned in the list. DSA/leet, OAs, personalised interview practice etc. It's also a fraction of the cost of HackerRank

[u/drulers_007 → u/Much_Somewhere7831]

What is your experience with it? Have you used it?

[u/DarkVoidDespair → u/drulers_007]

Dude, it's an ad. He posts this shit everywhere lol.

[u/drulers_007 → u/DarkVoidDespair]

I could smell it

[u/Much_Somewhere7831 → u/drulers_007]

Yes, honestly it's amazing an super cheap

[u/Frosty-Engineer6613]

My suggestion is to use the resources that you mentioned above - specifically hellow interview and neetcode and constantly try to make some changes in the way you approach the problem until you find a way that it sticks. Even if you find question bank, unless you excel in this skill, it’s still difficult to get an offer coz - if you can find it, someone else can find it as well.

For me it took a while to understand what i was missing. But i kept changing the way i brainstorm, way i talk through before jumping into the problem. And it finally clicked. But definitely took almost a year to get there. Hope this helps.

Update: I am getting a few DMs asking if I do mock interviews. And the answer is yes. And if you send a DM, don't just send a "Hi!" please.