Interviews
Technical interview prep without grinding LeetCode
Senior engineers share practical interview prep strategies for system design, project deep dives, behavioral stories, and production-quality coding.
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LeetCode isn't the only way
The tech interview landscape is shifting. While FAANG companies still rely heavily on algorithmic challenges, a growing number of companies in 2026 are adopting practical, work-sample interviews — and senior engineers are taking advantage.
We talked to 50+ engineers who landed $150K–$300K roles in 2025–2026 about their prep strategies. The consensus: system design, behavioral storytelling, and project deep-dives matter more than solving medium LeetCode problems.
The alternative prep strategy
1. System Design (40% of your prep time) — Practice designing real systems: a URL shortener, a chat application, a news feed. Focus on trade-offs, scalability, and explaining your reasoning clearly.
2. Behavioral/CARL Stories (30% of prep) — Prepare 12 stories using the CARL framework covering: leadership, conflict, failure, technical decision-making, teamwork, and ambiguity.
3. Code Quality over Speed (20% of prep) — Instead of grinding 200 problems, do 30 well. Write clean, tested, production-quality code. Explain your approach before coding.
4. Company-Specific Research (10% of prep) — Read the company's engineering blog, understand their tech stack, and prepare thoughtful questions about their architecture.
Practice with AI
Our AI Interview Question Generator creates role-specific questions tailored to your target company and level. It generates behavioral, technical, and system design questions — with suggested answer frameworks.
Pair it with our Salary Estimator to know your market value before you walk into the final round.
Paste your resume into the checker and read what it finds, what it misses and the lines to fix. Free, no account.
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