Salesforce interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Salesforce software engineering interview across 4 levels and 21 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

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Software Engineer Intern (AMTS Intern / SDE Intern, Summer / 2-6 month)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: No formally published intern cooldown; candidates can typica

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (HackerRank)

    Assessment · 60-90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: Asteroid Collision — Given an array of integers representing asteroids in a row, each value's absolute value is its size and its sign its direction (positive = moving right, negative = moving left). When two asteroids meet, the smaller one explodes; if equal, both explode; same-direction asteroids never meet. Return the state of the asteroids after all collisions. Input: first line n, then n integers.

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview 1 (Coding + Projects)

    Onsite · 45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live interview · CoderPad

    Sample question: Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters — Given a string, return the length of the longest substring that contains no repeating characters. E.g. 'abcabcbb' -> 3 ('abc').

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview 2 (DSA + CS Fundamentals)

    Onsite · 45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Number of Islands — Given an m x n binary grid of '1' (land) and '0' (water), count the number of islands. An island is a maximal group of '1' cells connected 4-directionally (up/down/left/right). Input: first line 'm n', then m rows of the grid.

  4. Round 3: HR / Senior Manager Round (Behavioral)

    Behavioral · 30-45 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

MTS (Member of Technical Staff, ~SDE-2)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / Screening Call

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank, India-only 'General Software Engineer Assessment')

    Assessment · ~60-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Number of Islands — Given an m x n grid of '1' (land) and '0' (water), count the number of islands. An island is formed by connecting adjacent land cells horizontally or vertically and is surrounded by water.

  3. Round 2: Technical Round 1 - DSA / Problem Solving (virtual)

    Phone · ~45-60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Rotting Oranges — In an m x n grid each cell is 0 (empty), 1 (fresh orange), or 2 (rotten). Each minute, any fresh orange 4-directionally adjacent to a rotten one becomes rotten. Return the minimum minutes until no fresh orange remains, or -1 if impossible.

  4. Round 3: Technical Round 2 - DSA + Low-Level Design (part of onsite drive)

    System_design · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Meeting Room Reservation / Booking System (LLD) — Design a low-level system that lets employees book meeting rooms: check availability for a time range, create/cancel bookings, and prevent double-booking. Model the classes, concurrency for simultaneous booking attempts, and the availability lookup.

  5. Round 4: Onsite / Hiring Manager Round (in-person, Hyderabad or Bangalore)

    Onsite · ~45-90 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

SMTS (Senior Member of Technical Staff, ~senior/SDE-3)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-3 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter Screening

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank, India)

    Assessment · ~60-90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: LFU Cache — Design and implement a Least-Frequently-Used (LFU) cache with a given capacity supporting get(key) and put(key,value) in O(1). On overflow, evict the least-frequently-used key; break ties by evicting the least-recently-used among the minimum frequency.

  3. Round 2: DSA / Coding Round

    Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Maximum Frequency Stack — Implement FreqStack supporting push(x) and pop(). pop() removes and returns the most frequent element; if several share the top frequency, return the one pushed most recently.

  4. Round 3: Low-Level Design + Coding

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Scalable Notification / Push-Notification System — Design a system that delivers real-time notifications to millions of users: per-user preferences, priority/transactional vs marketing notifications, push vs pull delivery, fan-out, delivery guarantees, and horizontal scaling.

  5. Round 4: High-Level System Design

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Distributed Job Scheduler — Design a system to schedule and execute jobs in a distributed environment: reliable at-least-once/exactly-once execution, fault tolerance across nodes, retries, leader election / work distribution, and horizontal scaling.

  6. Round 5: Core Backend Deep Dive (Java + Distributed Systems)

    Onsite · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  7. Round 6: Hiring Manager + Culture/Leadership

    Behavioral · ~45 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Lead MTS (LMTS, ~staff-level lead)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: Not documented.

  1. Round 0: Recruiter Screening

    Phone · ~30 min

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Coding / DSA Round(s)

    Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Path with Maximum Gold — Given an m x n grid where each cell holds an amount of gold (0 = empty), start at any cell with gold and repeatedly move up/down/left/right to an adjacent gold cell, never revisiting a cell and never stepping on a 0. Return the maximum gold collectible on one such path.

  3. Round 2: Low-Level Design

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Multi-Tenant CRM Data Model — Design Salesforce's core multi-tenant CRM data model for Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities: store thousands of tenants' data with isolation and security, support per-tenant custom fields/objects, and keep queries efficient at scale (partitioning by tenant, metadata-driven schema).

  4. Round 3: High-Level / System Design

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Scalable API Gateway for Integrations — Design an API gateway fronting Salesforce integration APIs: routing, load balancing, authentication/security checks, per-tenant rate limiting/throttling, and observability at high request volume.

  5. Round 4: Hiring Manager + Technical Leadership / Behavioral

    Behavioral · ~45-60 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Other companies' interview processes

Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.