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.
45%
Share of difficulty-labeled questions at advanced level (14,060 of 31,231). Another 45% are intermediate — only 10% of the bank is warm-up material.
SQL: still #1
1,260 questions — the single most-tested topic across all 21 role tracks, not just analyst roles. Two decades in, nothing else comes close as one topic.
1,750
Questions on LLMs, RAG, fine-tuning, agents and prompt engineering combined — the GenAI cluster now outweighs SQL. That is the 2026 shift in one number.
22%
Share of the bank covered by the ten biggest topics. The other 78% spreads across 423 more topics — interviews reward breadth, not one crammed subject.
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
| Role track | Top three topics (question count) |
|---|---|
| Data Analyst | SQL (365) · Product Analytics (160) · A/B Testing (140) |
| Analytics Engineer | SQL (365) · Product Analytics (160) · A/B Testing (140) |
| Data Engineer | Data Modeling (125) · Data Warehousing (125) · Experimentation (125) |
| Backend Engineer | Caching (125) · Concurrency (125) · Databases (125) |
| DevOps Engineer | Monitoring (308) · IAM (168) · Networking (168) |
| Site Reliability Engineer | Monitoring (433) · Networking (293) · Kubernetes (270) |
| GenAI Engineer | Agents (100) · Embeddings (100) · Evaluation (100) |
| Frontend Engineer | JavaScript (112) · Accessibility (111) · CSS (111) |
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.
Practice against this bank, free
The same 32,231-question bank powers Interview Prep (role- and company-filtered practice with model answers) and the free topic guides — start with SQL, Python or the full topic index.
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.mjsin 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.