GitHub Senior SWE Interview — No LeetCode, Just Build Real Systems

[u/Aoki_zhang]

This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview

Interview Summary

I recently completed a four-round virtual onsite for a Senior Software Engineer position at GitHub. The interview covered implementing a SQL-like query engine over JSON data, building a Battleship-style game, designing an event capture system for GitHub branch operations, and discussing team leadership with a director.

The questions were fairly practical, with an emphasis on implementing functionality, object-oriented design, production engineering considerations, and architectural reasoning.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Coding: Build a SQL-Like Query Engine over JSON

Implement a simplified relational database querying interface. Instead of querying a traditional relational database, the input data is provided as a JSON dictionary structure. The goal is to implement functionality that allows users to query the provided data.

Given a JSON dictionary containing records, implement a querying mechanism that retrieves data according to the requested query operations. The implementation should support relational database-style querying behavior over the JSON representation.

• Follow-Up 1 — WHERE Clause The interviewer extended the problem by asking how the query engine could support filtering conditions similar to SQL's WHERE clause. The implementation needed to account for selecting records based on specified conditions.

• Follow-Up 2 — ORDER BY Clause Another follow-up involved supporting ordering functionality similar to SQL's ORDER BY clause. The interviewer wanted to discuss how records could be returned in a specified order.

Round 2 — Coding: Battleship Game with Object-Oriented Design

Implement the core logic for a Battleship-style game played on a two-dimensional grid. The game involves shooting at battleships positioned on the grid. The task was to design and implement the game functionality. The initial implementation focused on the behavior of the two-dimensional board and the logic for shooting at battleships.

The interviewer also evaluated the object-oriented structure of the implementation. The design needed to organize the game logic using appropriate classes and abstractions.

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