Claude Technical Interview Preparation Coach Prompt
Prepare for technical coding interviews with custom practice problems, optimal solutions, and interview strategy for top tech companies.
Category
🎯 Career
Difficulty
Advanced
Models
3
Last Updated
2026-06-28
Works with
📄 Example output
⚠️ Common Mistakes
❓ FAQ
⚙️ Fill in your variables
📋 Prompt
You are a senior software engineer who has conducted 300+ technical interviews at top tech companies.
Target role: [SWE/SDE2/Senior/Staff Engineer]
Companies: [Google/Meta/Amazon/Stripe/startup/any]
Weakest areas: [arrays/trees/graphs/DP/system design/SQL]
Timeline: [1 week/2 weeks/1 month/3 months]
Task:
1. SKILLS GAP: What to close for [role] at [companies]
2. STUDY PLAN: Week-by-week for [timeline] with problem counts
3. PROBLEM SET for each weak area: 2 easy warm-ups, 3 medium core, 1 hard stretch; KEY INSIGHT for each
4. INTERVIEW STRATEGY: 5-step framework for unseen problems, communication while coding, when to ask for hints
5. SYSTEM DESIGN: 3 most common questions for [companies]
6. BEHAVIOURAL: STAR method for 5 most common questions
7. MOCK PROBLEM: One complete problem with optimal solution, complexity, edge cases
Target role: [SWE/SDE2/Senior/Staff Engineer]
Companies: [Google/Meta/Amazon/Stripe/startup/any]
Weakest areas: [arrays/trees/graphs/DP/system design/SQL]
Timeline: [1 week/2 weeks/1 month/3 months]
Task:
1. SKILLS GAP: What to close for [role] at [companies]
2. STUDY PLAN: Week-by-week for [timeline] with problem counts
3. PROBLEM SET for each weak area: 2 easy warm-ups, 3 medium core, 1 hard stretch; KEY INSIGHT for each
4. INTERVIEW STRATEGY: 5-step framework for unseen problems, communication while coding, when to ask for hints
5. SYSTEM DESIGN: 3 most common questions for [companies]
6. BEHAVIOURAL: STAR method for 5 most common questions
7. MOCK PROBLEM: One complete problem with optimal solution, complexity, edge cases
INTERVIEW PREP: Senior SWE — Stripe/Shopify | 6 weeks
SKILLS GAP: Product companies weight code quality and system design heavily — less extreme LeetCode than Google.
6-WEEK PLAN:
Week 1–2: Arrays, Strings, Hash Maps (2 mediums/day)
Week 3: Trees, Graphs, BFS/DFS
Week 4: DP — 1 easy + 1 medium + pattern review daily
Week 5: System Design intensive
Week 6: Mock interviews + gap review
DP PROBLEM SET:
Easy: Climbing Stairs (LC70) — 1D DP, Fibonacci
Easy: House Robber (LC198) — 1D DP with constraint
Medium: Coin Change (LC322) — KEY: build optimal from 0, canonical unbounded knapsack
Medium: LIS (LC300) — KEY: for each element, best subsequence ending here?
Medium: Word Break (LC139) — KEY: can I partition this? Think backwards.
5-STEP APPROACH:
1. Clarify (2 min): constraints, edge cases
2. Brute force (2 min): state aloud, don't code
3. Optimise (5 min): identify bottleneck
4. Code (15–20 min): clean names, readable logic
5. Test (5 min): walk through test cases
MOCK: Find unique combinations summing to target.
Optimal: Backtracking, sorted, skip duplicates
Time: O(N^(T/M)) | Space: O(T/M)
Edge cases: empty candidates, target=0, all > target
SKILLS GAP: Product companies weight code quality and system design heavily — less extreme LeetCode than Google.
6-WEEK PLAN:
Week 1–2: Arrays, Strings, Hash Maps (2 mediums/day)
Week 3: Trees, Graphs, BFS/DFS
Week 4: DP — 1 easy + 1 medium + pattern review daily
Week 5: System Design intensive
Week 6: Mock interviews + gap review
DP PROBLEM SET:
Easy: Climbing Stairs (LC70) — 1D DP, Fibonacci
Easy: House Robber (LC198) — 1D DP with constraint
Medium: Coin Change (LC322) — KEY: build optimal from 0, canonical unbounded knapsack
Medium: LIS (LC300) — KEY: for each element, best subsequence ending here?
Medium: Word Break (LC139) — KEY: can I partition this? Think backwards.
5-STEP APPROACH:
1. Clarify (2 min): constraints, edge cases
2. Brute force (2 min): state aloud, don't code
3. Optimise (5 min): identify bottleneck
4. Code (15–20 min): clean names, readable logic
5. Test (5 min): walk through test cases
MOCK: Find unique combinations summing to target.
Optimal: Backtracking, sorted, skip duplicates
Time: O(N^(T/M)) | Space: O(T/M)
Edge cases: empty candidates, target=0, all > target
🏆
💡 Pro Tips
Best model for this prompt
DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3 / R1
Talk while you code — interviewers evaluate communication as much as correctness
Walk through a concrete example before writing any code
For DP: recursive brute force → memoize → bottom-up tabulation
Code quality matters at senior level — meaningful names, clean conditionals
Jumping straight to code — 5 min understanding beats 25 min recoding
Not asking about constraints
Ignoring edge cases — empty arrays, null, integer overflow
Giving up silently — if stuck, state your thinking; interviewers give hints to those who show process
- How many LeetCode problems?100 well-understood problems across all patterns beats 300 memorised. For FAANG: 150–200. For product companies: 75–100 focused on medium difficulty.
- System design importance?Critical at senior level — weighs as much as coding. Practice: URL shortener, social media feed, distributed cache, ride-sharing. Know CAP theorem, sharding, consistent hashing.
- Best model?DeepSeek R1 is exceptional — reasoning mode thinks through solutions step-by-step and identifies edge cases. Claude is stronger for system design discussions.
- Handle an unseen problem?State brute force immediately — shows you understand it. Then identify the bottleneck. Interviewers evaluate process more than memorised answers.