Original data · updated 29 July 2026

What 32,231 interview questions reveal about tech interviews in 2026

PrepNPlaced's Interview Prep tool runs on a curated bank of 32,231 questions modeled on real interview loops at 61 companies, across 21 role tracks. This report aggregates that entire bank: what gets asked, how hard it is, and what each role is actually grilled on. To be clear about what this is: a structured picture of our curated question bank, not a survey of live interviews. The full methodology, including every limitation, is at the end.

SQL still rules, but the GenAI cluster just passed it

No single topic beats SQL's 1,260 questions. It is the one skill every data-adjacent loop still screens. But add up the GenAI topics, LLMs (450), RAG (450), fine-tuning (450), agents, prompt engineering, and the cluster reaches 1,750, overtaking SQL. The quiet second place is telling too: monitoring and observability, at 1,049 questions, out-ranks statistics (840), Kubernetes (560) and every individual cloud service. Candidates rarely prepare for it; interview loops clearly do.

Only 10% of the bank is warm-up

Distribution of the 31,231 questions carrying a difficulty label, normalized from 15 raw labels into three bands (mapping in the methodology). The takeaway for preparation: screening rounds are won at intermediate depth, and offers at advanced depth. A foundations-only pass covers a tenth of what loops actually ask.

What each role is actually grilled on

Two patterns worth acting on. First, SRE and DevOps loops are dominated by monitoring, the same under-prepared topic from the ranking above. Second, data-engineer loops lead with modeling and warehousing concepts, not tool trivia: Spark syntax gets you into the round; grain, SCDs and contract thinking get you through it.

The 25-minute answer

Among the 5,200 questions annotated with a suggested answer time, the median is 25 minutes. These are not flash-card prompts. The modern technical round expects a worked discussion: trade-offs, failure modes, follow-ups. It is also why the bank's questions carry follow-up chains and evaluation criteria rather than one-line answers.

Whose loops does the bank model?

The bank is weighted toward companies whose interview loops are deep and well-documented: Google (3,604 questions), Meta (2,804), Netflix (2,788), Amazon (2,455), Microsoft (2,201) and Airbnb (1,695) lead the 61 companies covered. One honest gap: behavioral and HR-round material is a small slice (a few hundred questions). This bank is deliberately a technical-round instrument, and our HR answer guides cover that ground instead.

Methodology & limitations

• Dataset: the 32,231 unique questions (de-duplicated by id) in PrepNPlaced's Interview Prep bank as of 29 July 2026, spanning 21 role tracks, 61 companies and 433 distinct topics. Aggregates are reproducible with scripts/seo/verify-questions-report.mjs in our codebase.
• What this is: a curated bank modeled on real interview loops, sourced from interview reports, role rubrics and expert curation, not a survey of live interviews. 31,031 questions (96.3%) are admin-curated; 1,200 (3.7%) are AI-generated practice patterns, and they are disclosed here because they are part of the same product.
• Difficulty bands normalize 15 raw labels: Easy/Entry/Foundational/Core → foundational; Medium/Intermediate/Mid variants → intermediate; Hard/Advanced/Senior/Staff/Principal/Expert/Lead variants → advanced. 1,000 questions carry no difficulty label and are excluded from the difficulty chart only.
• Answer-time median is computed over the 5,200 questions (16%) that carry a suggested-time annotation; the rest are unannotated, not assumed.
• Company weighting reflects how deeply each company's loop is documented in the bank. It is coverage, not a claim about interview frequency at those companies.
• Round-type and question-type fields are unpopulated on most rows (84% and 50%) and are deliberately not used as headline dimensions.