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4,347 principal engineer interview questions shared by candidates

I’m a foreigner so below are some of the interview questions. Round 1: 1. Tell me about yourself and what you did in your previous work/post graduate studies. 2. Interviewers shared briefly the job scope and description. Round 2: 1. Present a technical presentation on your previous job/post graduate work. 2. Why did you choose tsmc and why Taiwan? 3. Are you single or married, do you have a girlfriend? 4. If you are here for a few years, it will be damaging to our department as we need time to train you and groom a talent. 5. Tell me about yourself in 3mins besides your previous job and work.
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Principal Engineer

Interviewed at TSMC

3.3★
Feb 28, 2023

I’m a foreigner so below are some of the interview questions. Round 1: 1. Tell me about yourself and what you did in your previous work/post graduate studies. 2. Interviewers shared briefly the job scope and description. Round 2: 1. Present a technical presentation on your previous job/post graduate work. 2. Why did you choose tsmc and why Taiwan? 3. Are you single or married, do you have a girlfriend? 4. If you are here for a few years, it will be damaging to our department as we need time to train you and groom a talent. 5. Tell me about yourself in 3mins besides your previous job and work.

A few technical questions about firmware such as what happens during interrupts. Questions about my past projects. One person wanted to verify what I have done and listed in my CV. How do I relate to this position? Questions about my future plans. How do I handle different situation at the work environment.
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Software Systems Principal Engineer (Firmware)

Interviewed at Dell Technologies

3.7★
May 20, 2016

A few technical questions about firmware such as what happens during interrupts. Questions about my past projects. One person wanted to verify what I have done and listed in my CV. How do I relate to this position? Questions about my future plans. How do I handle different situation at the work environment.

1. Design a tiny url service. 2. Describe technology trends that will disrupt the industry in the coming years. 3. Back of the napkin calculation on number of Google drive users in the world? How would you relate to known data and extra polate? 4. Design a analytics stream pipeline for microsoft exchange server logs that are highly sensitive in nature and include PII? The catch here was to design such that data does not leave the source. I however, designed with data anonymization leaving the source and traveling through a pipeline of independent systems loosely connected with a messaging system which did not solve the problem 100%. 5. Design a logging utility, major interfaces and class diagram. 6. Design a Devops utility tool to allow resource allocation and automated deploy and rollback of software components. I had read the Google Borg paper, so I just picked salient features from there. This interview stretched to a hour and a half and went into great details of choice of tech stack to solving interesting questions on resource allocation. The interviewer was very bright. 7. Culture fit round mostly included questions on past experience and leadership skills.
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Principal Engineer

Interviewed at Microsoft

4★
Jul 18, 2017

1. Design a tiny url service. 2. Describe technology trends that will disrupt the industry in the coming years. 3. Back of the napkin calculation on number of Google drive users in the world? How would you relate to known data and extra polate? 4. Design a analytics stream pipeline for microsoft exchange server logs that are highly sensitive in nature and include PII? The catch here was to design such that data does not leave the source. I however, designed with data anonymization leaving the source and traveling through a pipeline of independent systems loosely connected with a messaging system which did not solve the problem 100%. 5. Design a logging utility, major interfaces and class diagram. 6. Design a Devops utility tool to allow resource allocation and automated deploy and rollback of software components. I had read the Google Borg paper, so I just picked salient features from there. This interview stretched to a hour and a half and went into great details of choice of tech stack to solving interesting questions on resource allocation. The interviewer was very bright. 7. Culture fit round mostly included questions on past experience and leadership skills.

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