Salesforce interview notes, page 2 of 13

Large Enterprises

Most of these Salesforce write-ups come from Software Engineers (104), then Product Managers (6) and Backend Engineers (4). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (65), the system design round (31), the hiring manager screen (6) and the behavioral / leadership round (5).

121 interview notes · updated Sep 2026

Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Salesforce software engineer interview with two algorithm problems back to back. Nothing too exotic but the second question had a subtle definition that tripped me up mid-solution.

Given a list of words, what is the minimum number of character substitutions needed so that no word contains two identical adjacent characters?
Given an array of unique integers, find the minimum number of elements to remove so that deleting at most one more element from the result would leave the array strictly ascending.

“Felt pretty manageable.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Salesforce SWE coding round, pretty standard sliding window problem. Nothing too wild but the edge cases tripped me up more than I expected.

Given two strings, find all starting indices in the first string where an anagram of the second string begins.

“I knew sliding window was the move pretty fast, but I fumbled the incremental update part.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

System design round at Salesforce for a software engineer role. The prompt was a coffee ordering system, which sounds straightforward until you get into the weeds on notification coordination and scaling the order pipeline across stores.

Design an online coffee ordering system that supports browsing a menu, placing orders at specific store locations, payment, real-time order status tracking, customer pickup, and refunds.
How would you handle real-time order status notifications between the customer and the store, including retries when a store device goes offline and ensuring state transitions don't get applied more than once?

“I started with the happy path and it went fine, but the interviewer kept pushing on what happens at peak hours.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Salesforce SWE coding round, one algorithm question on strings. Pretty straightforward session, nothing too wild.

Given two strings, find and return their longest common substring.

“Went with a dynamic programming table approach.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Salesforce SWE interview, technical phone screen focused on tree/recursion problems. The main question was a JSON flattening exercise that sounds trivial until you actually have to handle all the edge cases on the spot.

Given a nested dictionary (where values can be primitives or arrays), write a function that flattens it into a single-level dictionary with dot-separated keys representing the path to each leaf. Walk through your DFS approach, then discuss how you'd handle arrays and edge cases like empty objects or key collisions.

“I got the basic recursive case pretty fast, joining keys with dots as you go deeper.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Salesforce SWE interview, got a dynamic programming problem involving prime splitting on strings. The constraint about big numbers requiring Miller-Rabin was the part that really separated people who'd thought about this before from those who hadn't.

Given a string of digits, count the number of ways to split it into contiguous non-empty segments where every segment represents a prime number. Segments must preserve order, cover every character exactly once, have no leading zeros, and the answer should be returned modulo 1,000,000,007.

“My first instinct was just DP from left to right, define dp[i] as the number of valid splits for the first i characters, and for each position try all possible last segments.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Did a technical screen for a SWE role at Salesforce, came up pretty standard with foundational CS concepts.

What are the different types of software testing?

“Ran through unit, integration, and end-to-end testing and kind of stalled after that.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Salesforce coding round, one question on linked lists. Pretty standard stuff but the implementation details can trip you up if you're not careful.

Given a singly linked list of integers, remove all duplicate nodes so that only the first occurrence of each value is kept. Return the head of the modified list.

“Knew right away it was a hash set problem.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Salesforce SWE interview with a topological sort problem dressed up as a CI/CD task scheduler. Pretty classic graph question but the build system framing threw me for a second before I realized what they were actually asking.

You're building a task scheduler for a CI/build system. Given n tasks and a list of dependency pairs where [a, b] means task a can't start until task b finishes, return a valid execution order for all tasks. If a cycle exists, return an empty list.

“Took me a moment to strip away the build system flavor and see it was just topological sort.”

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Salesforce·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

Salesforce system design round focused entirely on building an async job/task system. Pretty deep dive, they pushed on almost every layer of the design and I definitely left a few things half-baked.

Design an asynchronous job system where clients can submit long-running tasks, poll or subscribe for status updates, cancel jobs, and retrieve results when finished.
How would you implement retry logic for failed jobs, and how do you prevent a single bad job from blocking the queue indefinitely?
How do you make job submission and execution idempotent so that retries don't cause duplicate work?
Walk through the storage trade-offs for persisting job state. When would you choose a relational database versus a NoSQL store?
How would you design the worker layer, including queue choice, worker pool management, and handling visibility timeouts or lease expiration?

“I started with the API surface and the state machine, which felt like the right move.”

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