Interview Guides

Known Software Engineer Interview Questions & Guide 2026

KnownSoftware Engineer

Updated Jun 14, 2026

Known Software Engineer interview questions & guide 2026

Every question Known interviewers actually ask, the frameworks that win the room, and the language hiring managers respond to.

Question bank

What is a Software Engineer at Known?

A Software Engineer at Known plays a critical role in bridging the gap between advanced data science, modern media strategies, and highly scalable technology products. As a engineered-product driven agency, Known relies on its engineering team to build proprietary software that optimizes advertising campaigns, manages massive datasets, and delivers real-time analytics. Whether you are developing highly responsive user interfaces or architecting robust backend pipelines, your work directly impacts how some of the world's largest brands interact with their audiences.

In this role, you will contribute to core products that handle complex data processing, automated media buying, and machine learning integrations. For example, engineers on the product team frequently work with modern frontend frameworks like React to build intuitive, performance-oriented dashboards, while platform engineers design the microservices and data pipelines that power these interfaces. The engineering culture at Known is highly collaborative, requiring you to work closely with data scientists, product managers, and creative teams to translate complex business requirements into elegant technical solutions.

The scale and complexity of the problem space make this position exceptionally rewarding. You will face challenges related to high-throughput data processing, state management in complex web applications, and system reliability. To succeed, you must possess a strong foundation in software engineering principles, a passion for product quality, and the adaptability to navigate a fast-paced, evolving technical landscape.

Common Interview Questions

To help you prepare effectively, we have categorized representative questions based on real interview experiences at Known. These questions highlight key patterns in what the hiring team evaluates, ranging from core coding capabilities to product-focused problem-solving.

React & Frontend Engineering

These questions evaluate your understanding of modern frontend development, component architecture, state management, and performance optimization, particularly for product-focused engineering roles.

Explain how you manage complex state across a large-scale React application.
How do you optimize a React application that is experiencing rendering bottlenecks when handling real-time data streams?

Describe the lifecycle of a component and how you would implement custom hooks to reuse stateful logic.
How would you approach building a reusable component library that supports both accessibility and strict design system guidelines?
Walk me through how you would handle asynchronous data fetching and error boundaries in a modern single-page application.

Practical Coding & Environment Configuration

These questions test your core algorithmic problem-solving skills, code quality, and your ability to configure development environments effectively.

Implement a function to parse and validate complex configuration files, and explain how you would handle syntax or structural errors.
Write a clean, optimized algorithm to solve a data manipulation problem, ensuring your solution handles edge cases and scale.
How do you configure and manage environment-specific settings files (such as Webpack, Babel, or application-level configurations) to ensure smooth deployment pipelines?
Describe your process for debugging a memory leak in a running node service or client-side application.

System Design & Architecture

These questions assess your ability to design scalable, reliable, and maintainable software systems that align with Known's data-driven infrastructure.

Design a real-time analytics dashboard that needs to process and display millions of ad-impression events per minute.
How would you architect a backend service to support a new marketing automation feature, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance?
Explain how you would design a secure, versioned API that is consumed by both internal product teams and external clients.
How do you approach database schema design when building a system that requires both rapid transactional writes and complex analytical reads?

Behavioral & Collaboration

These questions help interviewers understand how you communicate, handle ambiguity, and collaborate within cross-functional teams.

Describe a time when you had to resolve a technical disagreement with a product manager or fellow engineer. What was the outcome?
How do you prioritize technical debt when working under tight deadlines to deliver a new product feature?
Tell me about a complex technical problem you solved recently. How did you explain your approach to non-technical stakeholders?
How do you handle a situation where you realize a deployed feature has introduced a critical bug in production?

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To excel in the technical stages, you need to understand exactly what Known's engineering team looks for during your evaluations. The technical interviews are designed to simulate actual day-to-day engineering challenges.

Practical Coding & Configuration

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to write clean, production-ready code and configure it correctly. The interviewers want to see that you can take a problem from concept to execution, including the final details required to make the application run.

Be ready to go over:

Code Organization – How you structure your files, modules, and functions for readability and maintainability.
Edge-Case Handling – Identifying and gracefully managing unexpected inputs, network failures, or malformed data.
Configuration Management – Setting up environment variables, build tools, and application settings files correctly.
Advanced concepts (less common) – Optimizing build configurations, managing complex dependency trees, and writing custom compiler or bundler plugins.

Example scenarios:

"Implement a data parser that reads environment-specific settings and merges them with a global configuration object, handling syntax errors gracefully."
"Refactor a monolithic script into modular, testable components, ensuring proper build configuration settings are applied."

Product & Frontend Engineering (React)

For product-focused roles, your ability to build highly interactive and performant user interfaces using React is paramount. Interviewers evaluate how deeply you understand the framework's mechanics and how you translate designs into functional code.

Be ready to go over:

State Management – Choosing the right state patterns (local, context, or external state libraries) for the given use case.
Performance Optimization – Preventing unnecessary re-renders, lazy loading components, and optimizing heavy calculations.
Component Design – Creating highly reusable, accessible, and composable UI components.
Advanced concepts (less common) – Custom React hooks for complex state synchronization, server-side rendering (SSR) configurations, and intricate micro-frontend architectures.

Example scenarios:

"Build a real-time filtering component for a data table, ensuring the UI remains highly responsive even with thousands of rows."
"Design a custom hook that manages browser state (like local storage or URL parameters) and synchronizes it with the React component state."

System Design & Scalability

This area tests your ability to design robust backend architectures and data pipelines. It is especially critical for backend and full-stack roles where data processing and platform reliability are key.

Be ready to go over:

API Design – Developing clean, intuitive RESTful or GraphQL APIs that scale efficiently.
Data Pipelines – Designing systems that can ingest, process, and store large volumes of marketing and media data.
System Reliability – Implementing caching strategies, rate limiting, and failover mechanisms to protect core services.
Advanced concepts (less common) – Designing event-driven architectures, managing distributed transactions, and optimizing database index strategies for high-volume analytical queries.

Example scenarios:

"Architect a scalable service that collects user interaction events from client-side SDKs and queues them for asynchronous batch processing."
"Design a caching strategy for an API that serves frequently accessed configuration data, balancing consistency and latency."

Key Responsibilities

As a Software Engineer at Known, your day-to-day work will involve a mix of product development, system optimization, and cross-functional collaboration. You will be expected to take ownership of your code from design through to deployment.

You will spend a significant portion of your time designing and implementing new features for Known's proprietary platform. This includes writing clean, well-tested code in languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python, and ensuring that your frontend implementations align perfectly with backend APIs. You will also collaborate with product managers to refine feature requirements and with UI/UX designers to ensure a seamless user experience.

In addition to feature development, you will be responsible for maintaining the health and performance of the engineering ecosystem. This means participating in code reviews to maintain high quality standards, optimizing application performance, and troubleshooting production issues. You will also work closely with data engineering and data science teams to integrate advanced models and data sources into consumer-facing applications, ensuring that data flows smoothly and securely across the platform.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be competitive for a Software Engineer position at Known, you must demonstrate a strong technical foundation combined with practical, hands-on experience. The hiring team looks for candidates who can immediately contribute to their product roadmap.

Must-have skills – Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and modern frontend frameworks, particularly React (especially for product engineering roles). Solid understanding of HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design principles. Experience with backend technologies (such as Node.js, Python, or Go) and database systems (SQL and NoSQL). Familiarity with version control (Git) and modern build/deployment pipelines.
Nice-to-have skills – Experience in the advertising technology (ad-tech) or marketing technology industries. Familiarity with cloud infrastructure platforms (AWS, GCP) and containerization tools like Docker. Knowledge of data pipeline tools and large-scale data processing frameworks.
Experience level – Typically 3+ years of professional software engineering experience for mid-level roles, and 6+ years for senior-level positions, with a proven track record of shipping production-grade software.
Soft skills – Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders. A proactive, collaborative mindset and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with ambiguous requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the typical timeline for the interview process at Known? A: The entire process generally takes between 2 to 4 weeks, depending on interviewer availability and the candidate's schedule. Known aims to move candidates through the stages efficiently, though communication turnaround times can occasionally vary.

Q: How technical is the 90-minute technical deep dive? A: It is highly technical and hands-on. You will be expected to write actual code, solve structural problems, and configure environment settings. It is designed to mimic real-world development tasks rather than purely theoretical algorithmic puzzles.

Q: What sets successful candidates apart during the interviews? A: Successful candidates demonstrate not only strong coding skills but also a high degree of pragmatism. They communicate their thought process clearly, ask clarifying questions before writing code, and show that they care about the operational details, such as configuration and testing.

Q: Is there flexibility in the choice of programming languages during the coding assessments? A: For general software engineering roles, there is typically flexibility, though JavaScript and TypeScript are highly preferred, especially for frontend or full-stack positions. For specialized roles like a Product Engineer, React, you will be expected to complete the coding exercises using React and modern JavaScript.

Other General Tips

To maximize your chances of success during the Known interview process, keep these practical tips in mind:

Manage your time actively during the deep dive: The 90-minute technical deep dive is comprehensive. Keep track of the time and ensure you do not get stuck on a single optimization. It is better to have a fully working solution with minor configuration needs than an incomplete algorithm.
Verify your environment beforehand: Ensure your local development environment, IDE, and build tools are fully updated and functional before the technical interview. Having a smooth setup prevents unnecessary stress and technical delays during live coding.
Communicate your design trade-offs: Whenever you make a technical decision, explain why you chose that approach. Discussing the pros and cons of your chosen architecture or state management strategy shows maturity and depth as an engineer.

Note

Communication timelines can occasionally experience delays during busy hiring cycles. If you do not hear back within the promised window after your interviews, wait 2 to 3 business days and send a polite, structured follow-up to your recruiter to keep the process moving.

Focus on configuration as well as code: Do not neglect the settings or configuration files. Real-world applications rely heavily on correct environments, and demonstrating that you can configure your application properly is highly valued by the engineering team.

Summary & Next Steps

A Software Engineer role at Known offers an exciting opportunity to build impactful technology at the intersection of media, data science, and creative engineering. By working on complex, high-scale products, you will play a direct role in driving the technical innovation of a leading modern marketing agency. The work is challenging, highly collaborative, and deeply rewarding for engineers who love solving real-world product problems.

To prepare effectively, focus your energy on mastering core coding patterns, refining your system design skills, and ensuring you can write clean, configurable code under realistic conditions. Practicing your communication and structuring your past experiences using the STAR method will also ensure you stand out during the behavioral and technical discussion phases.

For additional community insights, real-world candidate experiences, and salary benchmarks to help you navigate your preparation, explore the resources available on Dataford.

15 · Compensation

What this role pays

4 reports

USUSD

Estimated total compLow confidence · 4 data points

$0k-$0k

Median $149k / year

Base salary · 100%Stock (RSU) · 0%Cash bonus · 0%

25thEntry / smaller markets

$105k

50thTypical offer

$149k

90thTop performers / major metros

$193k

Breakdown by component

Base salary

100% of total

$113k$183k

$148k

median

Stock (RSU)

0% of total

$0$0

median

Cash bonus

0% of total

$0$0

median

Aggregated from 4 self-reported salaries via Glassdoor. Estimates only. Verify against your offer.

The salary ranges shown above reflect the competitive compensation offered at Known. The range for a Software Engineer in New York typically spans $100,000 to$ 130,000 USD, while a specialized Product Engineer, React role in San Francisco ranges from $150,000 to$ 200,000 USD. When preparing for offer discussions, consider how your specific domain expertise, years of experience, and location align with these benchmarks.

16 · More at this company

Other roles at Known

Data Scientist

See the full Known guide

Create free account Already have an account? Sign in

Interview Guides

Known Software Engineer interview questions & guide 2026

What is a Software Engineer at Known?

Common Interview Questions

React & Frontend Engineering

Practical Coding & Environment Configuration

System Design & Architecture

Behavioral & Collaboration

The questions most likely to come up

See how a strong candidate would approach this

Explaining Technical Issues to Executives

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Interview Process Overview

The interview process, end to end

Tip

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Practical Coding & Configuration

Product & Frontend Engineering (React)

System Design & Scalability

What they actually test for

Key Responsibilities

Role Requirements & Qualifications

Frequently Asked Questions

Other General Tips

Note

Summary & Next Steps

What this role pays

Other roles at Known