Axon Interview Questions — Page 2

Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Axon for a software engineer role. The main problem was designing a distributed log collection system for client devices, and it got into some pretty specific territory around offline buffering and traffic spikes.

Design a logging system that collects logs from many client devices, uploads them to a backend, and makes them searchable in a web UI within 3 to 5 minutes of being generated (assuming the device is online).
How would your design handle devices that are offline for extended periods, and what happens to logs when they reconnect? Think about buffering, reliability, deduplication, and ordering.
If a large number of devices all come online and start uploading at the same time, how does your system handle that surge? Consider throttling, autoscaling, load shedding, and prioritization.

“This felt manageable at first but the 3 to 5 minute freshness requirement forced me to actually think about the pipeline end to end.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Axon for a software engineer role. The whole thing was one big deep-dive into an airline booking system, which sounds straightforward until you realize how many moving parts they actually want you to cover.

Design an airline booking system that handles flight search (including multi-leg connections), booking, seat selection, and itinerary changes or cancellations.
How would you define the REST or gRPC APIs for search, booking, modification, and cancellation? Walk through your data model for flights, legs, fares, seat inventory, reservations, and users.
How do you guarantee seat availability and prevent overbooking, especially across connecting flight segments? How do you handle idempotency in the booking flow?
What consistency model would you use across regions, and how do you balance strong versus eventual consistency for a globally distributed booking system?
How would you integrate payment processing, ticketing, notifications, and refund flows into the booking system?
How would you design the search layer to support filtering by origin, destination, date, and cabin class? How do you handle flexible-date search, caching, indexing, and pagination?
How would you scale this system, handle sharding, and manage read-heavy versus write-heavy traffic patterns? What's your resiliency strategy including failover, retries, and saga-based rollback?
What are the design differences between building this for a single airline versus a multi-tenant OTA platform? How would you handle partner API integration and rate limiting?

“This is the kind of question where you feel okay for the first ten minutes and then realize you've only covered like 15% of what they want.”

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Axon·Machine Learning Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026

Phone screen with a hiring manager at Axon for an MLE role, ran about an hour. Just one coding question, pretty light for a technical screen.

Given an array, find the first local minimum element.

“LeetCode easy territory.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Axon with a senior leader. Two questions stood out as less standard than the usual stuff, both requiring you to be honest without sounding like you're complaining or throwing people under the bus.

Tell me about a time when someone misunderstood you or your work. What was the misunderstanding, how did you find out about it, and what did you do to fix it?
What are you most dissatisfied with about your current team or working environment? Be specific about the issue, why it matters, what you've tried to do about it, and what you'd do differently with more authority.

“This one is sneaky because your first instinct is to pick a story where you were clearly right and the other person was clearly wrong.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Axon for a software engineering role, director-level style questions focused on self-awareness and team critique. Two questions, both the kind that sound easy until you're actually sitting there trying not to sound like you're complaining or making excuses.

What's something people have consistently misunderstood about you?
What are you least satisfied with about your current team, and what's behind it?

“I went with something about coming across as blunt in code reviews, which is true but I think I oversold the self-awareness angle and it ended up sounding rehearsed.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Axon for a software engineer role, ran the full hour. Pretty standard career walkthrough format but they pushed harder than I expected on the ethics question.

Walk me through your background and the projects you've worked on.
There are some gaps in your work history. Can you explain what you were doing during those periods?
Pick one project from your experience and go deep on it: the technical decisions, why you made them, and what the actual impact was.
Describe an ethical dilemma you faced at work. How did you think through it, what did you do, and what happened afterward?

“I'd done this a hundred times so I figured I could wing it.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Axon focused entirely on building a tamper-evident audit log for video evidence. One big question, lots of moving parts, and they clearly expected you to drive the whole thing from requirements down to rollout.

Design a scalable, tamper-evident audit logging system for video evidence that maintains a verifiable chain of custody, supports legal discovery, and never loses an event. Cover requirements, architecture, storage, event schema, integrity mechanisms, encryption, access controls, scalability, APIs, retention and legal hold policies, monitoring, disaster recovery, cost trade-offs, and a testing and rollout plan.

“This is a monster of a question.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Someone who just cleared the first round for an SDE1 role at Axon is trying to figure out what the AI coding round actually looks like before going in blind.

What does the AI coding round at Axon typically involve? Is it algorithm-style questions, system design, or something like navigating and debugging an existing codebase?

“No personal experience to share here since this is a forward-looking question from someone prepping for the next round.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Axon for a software engineer role, pretty much one question that took up the whole conversation.

Tell me about a time you faced an ethical dilemma at work. Walk me through the situation, why it felt sensitive, what you considered doing, what you actually did, and what happened.

“This is the kind of question that sounds easy until you're sitting there trying to remember a story that actually has teeth.”

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Axon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Axon for a software engineer role. One meaty question about building an analytical database for user event tracking, with a focus on schema design and query performance. Not the most grueling interview but it required more thought than I expected going in.

Design an analytical database to track user actions like search, view item, login, add to cart, purchase, and view order. The system needs to efficiently answer pre-written queries like 'how many users from Asia viewed item A this month?' or 'what are the three highest-value orders right now?' Walk through the schema, event model, and data flow.

“I started with a flat event table and the interviewer pushed back pretty fast.”

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