Software engineering
AI interviews for software engineers
Talk through your real engineering work with an AI interviewer. See your results first, with the quotes behind every score, and choose who sees them.
- Free for experts
- About 15 minutes, whenever you like
- Type or speak. No camera needed
Who it's for
For people who work in software engineering
Building and running software: web, mobile, backend, infrastructure, security and AI applications.
Example roles
- Full-Stack AI Engineer
- ML Platform Engineer
- AI Product Engineer
- Data / Infra Engineer
- Backend engineer
- Frontend engineer
- Mobile engineer
- Site reliability engineer
- Security engineer
When you apply, you can name your exact specialty. The interviewer fits its questions to it.
Not quite your field? See every field
The interview
What the 15-minute interview covers
A conversation about your own work, not trivia. Questions usually start with something you worked on recently, dig into what made it hard, and may end with a realistic situation from your field. Each question follows up on what you said.
Topics the interviewer draws on
- A production system they owned and what made it hard
- Debugging a failure or outage from first alert to fix
- A design tradeoff between speed, reliability, cost and maintainability
- Scaling a system or codebase as usage grew
- Keeping quality high with tests and code review under a deadline
- Explaining a technical risk to people who are not engineers
- Working with product and design on what to build
It picks what fits your specialty. It does not read these out as a list.
How your answers are scored
After the interview, an AI model reads your transcript and looks for evidence in four areas. Each area is scored from 1 to 100 only when it can quote your own words.
Problem Solving
Approach, debugging, edge cases
Counts as evidence when the candidate describes a specific problem, its cause, a fix, a trade-off, or a measured result.
Architecture
Architecture, system design, tradeoffs
Counts as evidence when the candidate describes how a system is built: components, data flow, storage, queues, APIs, scaling or consistency choices.
Communication
Clarity, structure, ability to explain
Counts as evidence when the candidate describes explaining, documenting or presenting work to other people (for example a design doc, a runbook, or walking a team through a change). Answering clearly is not, by itself, communication evidence.
Collaboration
How you work with teams, handle feedback
Counts as evidence when the candidate describes working with other people: teammates, stakeholders, reviews, mentoring, feedback or cross-team work. Saying "we" is not, by itself, collaboration evidence.
If your answers do not cover an area, it shows Not enough evidence instead of a low score. Scores come only from the words in your transcript. Your face, voice and accent are never scored.
Practice
Three example practice questions
These come from the practice room for software engineering. In the real interview, questions follow up on your own answers, so yours will be different.
- Question 1
Tell me about a production system you owned, what made it difficult, and what you personally changed.
- Question 2
Imagine that system starts failing under a 10x traffic spike. Walk me through the first three signals you would inspect and the mitigation you would ship first.
- Question 3
How would you explain the incident and recovery plan to a non-technical hiring manager without hiding the technical risk?
No account needed. Practice answers are not saved.
After the interview
What you get
Your results, first
Read your transcript and your scores in Problem Solving, Architecture, Communication, and Collaboration, with the quotes behind each one. An area without enough evidence says so.
Share links you control
Share your result with a link only when you want to. You decide who gets it, and you can turn the link off at any time.
Company interview links
If a company sends you its own interview link, you see the company and the role, and agree to share that interview with them before you start. You see the same result they see.
Free, with retakes
Experts never pay. You can retake the interview up to 3 times, and your newest result replaces the one before it. If a technical problem cuts an interview short, you can get a free retake.
How data is stored, used and deleted is in our privacy policy.
FAQ
Questions from software engineers
What will the AI interviewer ask me about?
Your own engineering work. Questions usually start with something you worked on recently and dig into what made it hard. Later questions may give you a realistic situation from your field or a hard choice to make. Each question follows up on what you said. There are no trick puzzles.
How is the interview scored for software engineering?
After the interview, an AI model reads your transcript and looks for evidence in four areas: Problem Solving, Architecture, Communication, and Collaboration. An area gets a score from 1 to 100 only when the model can quote your own words for it. Otherwise it says "Not enough evidence" instead of guessing. Your face, voice and accent are never scored.
Do I have to share confidential details?
No. Talk about systems in general terms, and leave out secrets, credentials and code you are not allowed to share. The interview is about your decisions and reasoning.
My work is mostly frontend, mobile, infrastructure or security. Will the questions fit?
Yes. Add your specialty and skills when you apply. The interviewer anchors its questions to them, including the design question.
Is this a certification or a license check?
No. An Aethel interview is not a certification, license or credential, and it does not verify degrees or licenses. It is a record of how you talked about your own work in one interview.
Who sees my results?
You see your results first. A company sees an interview only if you took it through that company's interview link. Anyone else sees a result only through a share link or a PDF verification code you make. If you turn on your Find experts profile, anyone can see your name, field, specialty, and area scores, but never your transcript or contact details. You can turn off a share link, a code, or your Find experts profile at any time. You can delete your interview records at any time from your profile page.
Is it free, and can I retake it?
Yes, it is free for experts. You can retake the interview up to 3 times from your results page, and your newest result replaces the one before it. If a technical problem cut an interview short, your results page offers a free retake that does not count toward the 3. If it does not, ask for a review. An interview taken through a company's link is taken once.
Can I practice first?
Yes. The practice room uses sample questions for software engineering and saves nothing. You do not need an account to try it.
More detail: how interviews work
Ready when you are
Apply in a few minutes, then interview whenever it suits you. You decide who sees your results.
Hiring software engineers? See how companies interview for software engineering