Senior Principal Engineer Interview Questions

302 senior principal engineer interview questions shared by candidates

The process is not difficult, but it is deliberate, and it can take time to schedule the various calls and meetings. Intentionality is critical to both the employer and the prospective employee in making good career decisions.
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Sr. Principal Engineer

Interviewed at Kittelson & Associates

3.9
Jun 2, 2025

The process is not difficult, but it is deliberate, and it can take time to schedule the various calls and meetings. Intentionality is critical to both the employer and the prospective employee in making good career decisions.

Got to the System design, a web crawler, which I had studied for. It was a custom web crawler, you can submit a list of URLs (100 urls max) and it wound find all images in any pages associated with the urls. But, this was more of a code design. Didn't care about throughput, storage capacity, endpoint security, load balancing, or flow of data through the system. They gave 3 endpoints and wanted you to design the crawler itself, how would it crawl the pages, and find the images. More like psuedo coding, but with graphical boxes. Not what I was expecting or prepared for.
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Senior Principal Engineer

Interviewed at Atlassian

3.1
Mar 10, 2025

Got to the System design, a web crawler, which I had studied for. It was a custom web crawler, you can submit a list of URLs (100 urls max) and it wound find all images in any pages associated with the urls. But, this was more of a code design. Didn't care about throughput, storage capacity, endpoint security, load balancing, or flow of data through the system. They gave 3 endpoints and wanted you to design the crawler itself, how would it crawl the pages, and find the images. More like psuedo coding, but with graphical boxes. Not what I was expecting or prepared for.

Describe the read write head fabrication process. This is very hard for people outside the thin film head business as it is a unique device to itself, unlike IC process or any MEMS device. It's very complex with dozens of masks
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Senior Principal Engineer

Interviewed at WD

3.7
May 21, 2014

Describe the read write head fabrication process. This is very hard for people outside the thin film head business as it is a unique device to itself, unlike IC process or any MEMS device. It's very complex with dozens of masks

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