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ansys

Large Enterprises

Ansys is a leading provider of engineering simulation software used across industries such as aerospace, automotive, electronics, and energy. Its tools enable engineers to model and analyze products for structural, fluid, thermal, and electromagnetic behavior before physical prototyping. Ansys is known for being a dominant player in the computer-aided engineering (CAE) market.

7 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

ansys·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Ansys ML fundamentals screen, basically a 20-minute quiz where they fire classic concepts at you and expect clean, concise answers. No coding, just theory. Felt more like a viva than an interview.
  • How do you detect overfitting versus underfitting, and what do you do to fix each?
  • What is the difference between regularization, standardization, and normalization, and when would you use each?
  • Compare Random Forest and LightGBM. When would you choose one over the other?
  • Explain the bias-variance trade-off and how model capacity, regularization, and dataset size each affect it.
  • Walk me through cross-validation, train/val/test leakage, feature engineering, and evaluation metrics.

“I started with the training vs validation loss gap explanation which felt solid, but then I fumbled a bit listing fixes.”

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ansys·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Fundamentals-heavy screen for a software engineer role at Ansys. Covered a pretty wide range of CS basics, from data structures and sorting algorithms to databases and concurrency. Nothing too surprising but it moved fast.
  • Walk me through the main data structures (arrays, linked lists, hash tables, heaps, trees) and explain when you'd pick one over the others.
  • Compare merge sort, quicksort, and binary search in terms of time and space complexity.
  • What is multithreading, and what kinds of problems come up when threads share state?
  • What is a deadlock, what conditions need to be true for one to occur, and how do you prevent it?
  • What does 'big data' actually mean in a practical context?
  • What are primary keys and foreign keys in a relational database, and how do they work together?

“This is the kind of question that feels easy until you're actually saying it out loud and realize you're just listing things without a real framework.”

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ansys·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Ansys had a pretty intense ML theory round for a Software Engineer role. Lots of foundational stuff but they moved through it fast, almost like a quiz.
  • What are overfitting and underfitting, and how do you detect and address each?
  • What's the difference between regularization, standardization, and normalization?
  • How do random forests and LightGBM compare, and when would you choose one over the other?
  • Can you explain the bias-variance tradeoff and how it influences which model you pick?

“Felt okay on the definitions but stumbled a bit when they pushed on detection in practice.”

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ansys·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Verbal/conceptual round for a software engineer role at Ansys. Pretty broad coverage, jumping between CS fundamentals and big data scenarios. Not the kind of round where you can fake it with vague answers.
  • When would you choose an array vs a hashmap vs a heap vs a tree vs a graph? Walk through the trade-offs.
  • What are the time complexities of merge sort and quicksort, and when would you prefer one over the other?
  • Explain deadlocks and race conditions. How do you handle synchronization in a multithreaded program?
  • At what point does a single-machine solution break down for large datasets, and how do you think about partitioning and MapReduce-style aggregation?
  • Given a large dataset, what kinds of aggregations would you want to compute on it and how would you approach doing that efficiently at scale?

“This sounds like a warmup but it actually sprawled.”

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ansys·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Coding interview for a software engineer role at Ansys with two problems back to back. Nothing too wild but the follow-up on the first one tripped me up a bit.
  • Design a data structure that supports inserting strings and counting how many stored strings share a given prefix. Follow-up: how would you make the search case-insensitive, and how would you strip trailing digits from inputs before storing or querying?
  • Given the head of a singly linked list and a target value, remove all nodes with that value and return the new head.

“The core trie implementation wasn't too bad, I got through insert and prefix count without much trouble.”

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ansys·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Interviewed for a software engineer role at Ansys and got a linked list removal problem. Pretty standard stuff but the edge cases around head node deletion tripped me up more than I expected.
  • Given the head of a singly linked list and an integer value, remove all nodes whose value matches that integer and return the new head.

“The basic traversal part was fine, but I fumbled the head removal case for a bit.”

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ansys·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
A 20-minute technical screen for a Software Engineer role at Ansys that split time between SQL and Python fundamentals. Nothing too wild, but the Python output-prediction questions felt more like a university exam than a real engineering interview.
  • What is the difference between a primary key and a foreign key, and what constraints does each impose?
  • Write SELECT, JOIN, and GROUP BY queries against a provided schema.
  • What is the difference between mutable and immutable types in Python? How do lists differ from tuples in this regard?
  • Explain how scoping and variable references work in Python.
  • Given several short Python code snippets, predict the output of each one.

“Pretty standard definitional stuff.”

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