These questions are based on real interview experiences from candidates who interviewed at this company. You can practice answering them interactively on Dataford to better prepare for your interview.

Focus on demonstrating end-to-end ownership: from platform fundamentals to architecture decisions, from performance to product sense, and from security to team leadership. Your interviewers will expect clarity in thought, precision in code, and the ability to navigate ambiguity with sound judgment.

• Role-related Knowledge (Technical/Domain Skills) – Interviewers look for fluency in iOS/Android frameworks, concurrency models (e.g., Swift Concurrency, Kotlin coroutines), performance profiling, and mobile-specific constraints (background execution, lifecycle, energy). Show you understand tradeoffs and can design for offline-first, search, and AI-assisted experiences.
• Problem-Solving Ability (How you approach challenges) – You’ll be assessed on how you decompose problems, evaluate alternatives, and reason about complexity and risk. Walk through edge cases, failure modes, and how you validate assumptions with metrics, logs, and experiments.
• Leadership (Influence and mobilization) – Expect to discuss how you set technical direction, gain consensus across Engineering, Product, and Design, mentor peers, and drive outcomes across time zones and teams. Show how you communicate decisions and hold a bar for quality.
• Culture Fit (Teamwork, trust, and ambiguity) – Demonstrate how you embody Customer Success, Innovation, Trust, and Equality. Interviewers will look for collaborative behaviors, clarity, humility, and how you create inclusive, maintainable systems that scale across an enterprise.

Salesforce’s interview experience for Mobile Engineers emphasizes both technical depth and product impact. You’ll move through a rigorous but collaborative process designed to uncover how you build, how you reason, and how you lead. Expect a blend of hands-on coding, architecture conversations, product-oriented discussions, and behavioral assessments anchored in real mobile constraints.

We prioritize signal over theatrics—interviews mirror the work: designing offline sync, debugging a performance issue, or shaping a mobile-first AI flow. Pacing is structured yet humane; you’ll meet a diverse panel across engineering and cross-functional partners. Our approach rewards clarity, tradeoff thinking, and craftsmanship as much as correctness.

This timeline shows the typical progression from recruiter alignment through technical assessments and team interviews to offer. Use it to plan preparation sprints and to stage examples that highlight both platform expertise and cross-functional leadership. Ask your recruiter about the technologies used by the specific team so you can tailor your stories and code to their stack.

Mobile Platform Expertise (iOS and/or Android)

You will be evaluated on how well you understand the platform you build for—frameworks, lifecycles, concurrency, and the nuances of UI architecture. Expect to demonstrate mastery of Swift/Objective‑C or Kotlin/Java, plus modern UI toolkits and testing strategies.

Be ready to go over:

• Concurrency and threading: Swift concurrency (async/await, Task, actors), GCD/Operations; Kotlin coroutines, structured concurrency, Dispatchers, thread safety.
• UI architecture: UIKit + SwiftUI composition, Jetpack Compose + ViewModel patterns, navigation, deep linking.
• Lifecycle and background work: App/scene lifecycles, WorkManager/background tasks, notifications, permissions, and OS constraints.
• Advanced concepts (less common): Accessibility (WCAG), device policy/MDM impacts, multi-window/multi-scene patterns, modularization and build performance.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Diagnose and fix a UI jank issue on a list rendering complex cells."
• "Design a background sync that respects battery constraints and OS scheduling."
• "Refactor a view controller/fragment into a modern, testable architecture."

Architecture & Offline-First Systems

Salesforce mobile apps often operate in unreliable networks. You’ll be assessed on your ability to design sync models, conflict resolution, and resilient storage that keep users productive.

Be ready to go over:

• Data modeling and storage: Room/Core Data/SQLite, schema evolution, caching, pagination.
• Sync strategies: Delta sync, optimistic updates, idempotency, backoff, retries, and conflict resolution policies.
• API design: Contract design for mobile clients, versioning, pagination, error taxonomies, and telemetry for reliability.
• Advanced concepts (less common): CRDTs, eventual consistency at scale, sync logging/repair tooling, offline-first UX patterns.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design offline editing for a field work order with concurrent edits by multiple users."
• "Propose a conflict resolution policy for a hierarchical object graph."
• "Instrument and measure sync reliability across geographies."

Performance, Reliability, and Observability

You’ll be expected to diagnose hot paths and optimize latency, memory, and battery. Strong candidates demonstrate methodical use of profiling tools and data-driven decision making.

Be ready to go over:

• Profiling and optimization: Instruments (Time Profiler, Allocations, Memory Graph), Android Studio Profiler, flame charts, sampling vs tracing.
• Rendering performance: List virtualization, diffing, image decoding/caching, layout vs draw costs.
• Reliability and stability: Crash triage, ANR mitigation, watchdog timeouts, cold-start/warm-start improvements.
• Advanced concepts (less common): On-device feature flags, guardrail metrics (P95/P99), power modeling, adaptive prefetching.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk through how you used Instruments/Profiler to find and fix a memory leak."
• "Reduce cold start time by 30%—where do you start, how do you measure?"
• "Contain a crash spike introduced by a poorly handled background task."

AI, Search, and Context-Aware Experiences

For teams like Slack Search and AI, interviewers will probe how you build findability and assistive experiences that feel native on mobile. Expect to discuss ranking tradeoffs, latency budgets, and responsible UX.

Be ready to go over:

• Search UX: Query understanding, incremental search, offline indexes vs server-driven results, ranking signals.
• AI-assisted flows: Prompt construction on-device vs server, privacy considerations, guardrails, and fallback behavior.
• Context and notifications: Smart actions from notifications, intents, deep links, device sensors for context.
• Advanced concepts (less common): Embeddings on-device vs edge, caching strategies for model inferences, A/B experimentation on mobile.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a mobile search experience that stays responsive under poor connectivity."
• "Integrate AI suggestions into a compose box—how do you measure usefulness and avoid distraction?"
• "Select what runs on-device vs on the server given latency and privacy constraints."

Security, Compliance, and Enterprise Constraints

Enterprise mobility requires careful attention to authentication, data-at-rest, and policy enforcement. You’ll need to demonstrate familiarity with security from the first line of code.

Be ready to go over:

• Auth flows: OAuth/OIDC, token refresh, SSO, certificate pinning, secure storage (Keychain/Keystore).
• Data handling: PII protection, encryption, redaction in logs, safe crash reporting.
• Device and policy: MDM, remote wipe, jailbreak/root detection, conditional access.
• Advanced concepts (less common): Per-record encryption, secure background tasks, regulatory constraints across regions.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Implement secure session management with seamless token refresh."
• "Handle crash logs without leaking sensitive data."
• "Design features to comply with device policies in an MDM-managed environment."