Technical Interview Preparation
A structured 8-week plan — coding, system design, and behavioral — with weekly focus areas, resources, and the most common failure modes to eliminate before your interview loop.
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Recommended preparation timeline for FAANG-level technical interviews
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Core algorithmic patterns that cover 80%+ of coding interview questions
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Behavioral stories needed to cover 90% of behavioral interview questions
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Most common failure modes — each worth eliminating before your loop
The 8-week preparation plan — week by week
Foundation
Data structures and core algorithms
2–3 LeetCode Easy problems, then move to Medium. Topics: arrays, strings, hash maps, two pointers, sliding window.
Key resource
LeetCode Explore cards for each data structure. Practice explaining your solution out loud — not just getting it right silently.
Depth
Trees, graphs, and recursion
2 LeetCode Medium problems per day. Topics: binary trees, BFS/DFS, graph traversal, backtracking, dynamic programming intro.
Key resource
Blind 75 problem list — work through the tree and graph sections specifically. Spend time on problems you find hard, not problems you can solve easily.
System Design Foundations
System design fundamentals
1 system design problem per day — spend 45 minutes treating it like a real interview. Topics: URL shortener, rate limiter, notification system, key-value store.
Key resource
System Design Primer on GitHub. The goal is to internalize the communication structure: requirements → scale estimate → high-level architecture → deep dive → bottlenecks.
System Design Depth
Complex system design and trade-offs
1 complex system design problem. Topics: distributed databases, real-time systems (chat, collaborative editing), recommendation systems, search infrastructure.
Key resource
Engineering blogs of your target companies. Stripe, Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber all publish deep engineering content that shows how real systems are built.
Behavioral Prep
STAR stories and company-specific behavioral
Write and practice 2 behavioral stories per day. Map each story to the question types your target company asks most. Record yourself and review for filler words, story length, and result specificity.
Key resource
Zari's behavioral coaching — practice each story with AI feedback on STAR structure and specificity before you go live with a human interviewer.
Full Simulation
End-to-end mock interviews
1-2 full mock interviews per day — coding (45 min), system design (45 min), behavioral (30 min). Prioritize live practice over more study. You learn more from simulating the real interview than from additional problem-solving.
Key resource
interviewing.io or Pramp for live technical practice. Zari for behavioral and communication simulation. Record every mock and identify your top 3 failure modes.
The 5 most common failure modes — and how to fix each
Solving silently
Fix: Interviewers evaluate your thinking, not just your answer. Practice narrating your approach before writing any code. This is a skill that requires deliberate practice — it doesn't happen automatically.
Skipping edge cases
Fix: Before declaring done, test: empty input, single element, all-same elements, negative numbers, overflow. Say these out loud. Interviewers who see you proactively test edge cases add positive signal.
Jumping to code without clarifying
Fix: The first 2-3 minutes of a coding interview are for clarifying the problem. Ask about input constraints, edge case handling, and expected output format. Candidates who ask good clarifying questions signal senior-level thinking.
Over-engineering system design
Fix: A simple, clearly communicated architecture with explicit trade-off acknowledgment beats a complex architecture poorly explained. Start with the simplest solution that could work, then add complexity with justification.
Behavioral stories without results
Fix: Every STAR story must end with a concrete result — not 'it went well' or 'we finished the project.' Quantify: percent improvement, dollar impact, time saved, users affected. If you can't quantify, describe the scale and significance specifically.
Common questions
How much time per day should I spend preparing for technical interviews?
2-4 hours per day for 6-8 weeks is the typical effective range. Less than 2 hours/day makes the preparation too fragmented to build intuition. More than 4-5 hours/day leads to diminishing returns and burnout. Consistency matters more than any single day's volume — 2 focused hours daily for 8 weeks outperforms 8 hours on weekends only. The most important practice is thinking out loud while solving, which can only happen with sustained focused sessions.
Should I focus on breadth (many problems) or depth (mastering patterns)?
Patterns over problems. There are ~15 core algorithmic patterns that cover 80%+ of coding interview questions: two pointers, sliding window, BFS/DFS, backtracking, dynamic programming (2 types), merge sort, binary search, and a few others. Deeply understanding each pattern — when to apply it, how to recognize it, what the time/space complexity is — and solving 5-10 problems of each type is more effective than solving 300 random problems. The Blind 75 is a well-curated list that hits the core patterns efficiently.
How do I know when I'm ready to start interviewing?
You're ready when you can consistently solve LeetCode mediums in under 20 minutes with clean code and out-loud explanation, you can whiteboard a system design problem structure in 5 minutes and discuss trade-offs for 40 minutes, and you have 6 strong behavioral stories that flex across different question types. You don't need to be perfect before interviewing — companies also expect some nervousness, and interviewing itself is practice. Over-preparing to avoid rejection often leads to missing application windows.
Ready to practice? Zari coaches every stage of your prep.
Zari coaches behavioral prep (STAR feedback, company-specific questions), system design structure, and salary negotiation — the three areas where preparation most directly affects offer rate and compensation.
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