Software Engineer Interview Questions (Australia)
Updated 2026 · Interview Buddy team
Software engineering interviews in Australia usually pair a technical assessment with a behavioural round that candidates underprepare for. At companies like Atlassian and Canva the values interview is a separately-scored stage; at the banks, structured STAR questions dominate.
The questions below are the behavioural and experience questions engineers actually face here. Practise them out loud — whiteboard fluency doesn't automatically transfer to talking about your own work.
The questions to prepare
1.
Walk me through the most technically complex project you have delivered. What trade-offs did you make and why?
2.
Tell me about a production incident you were involved in. What was your role, and what changed afterwards?
3.
Describe a technical disagreement in a code review or design discussion. How was it resolved?
4.
Tell me about a time you shipped something imperfect to hit a deadline. How did you decide what was acceptable?
5.
How do you approach working with legacy code nobody fully understands?
6.
Describe explaining a technical decision to a non-technical stakeholder who pushed back.
7.
Tell me about a time you mentored or unblocked another engineer.
8.
What technology have you championed — and one you argued against adopting?
9.
How do you decide when to refactor versus leave working code alone?
10.
Describe the best engineering culture you have worked in. What made it work?
How to stand out
•
Have three project stories at different depths — a 60-second version and a 5-minute deep-dive with real trade-offs, metrics and failures.
•
For values interviews, map your stories to the company’s published values beforehand — interviewers score against them explicitly.
•
Quantify: latency shaved, incidents reduced, adoption numbers. Engineers who bring numbers stand out.
•
Own a failure properly — what you changed afterwards is the part that scores.
Practise these questions out loud with an AI interviewer and get scored feedback on every answer. 3 free mock interviews when you sign up.
Frequently asked questions
What do Atlassian and Canva behavioural interviews focus on?
Both run dedicated values interviews scored against their published values. Prepare STAR stories evidencing collaboration, customer focus and integrity — technical strength does not compensate for failing this round.
Do Australian banks ask coding questions for engineering roles?
Usually yes, but lighter than big tech: a practical exercise or take-home plus a heavily structured behavioural interview, which carries more weight than most engineers expect.
How should engineers prepare for behavioural questions?
Build a story bank from your projects — incidents, disagreements, deadlines, mentoring — and practise them out loud in STAR form. Interview Buddy’s Technical mode asks engineer-specific questions and scores each answer.
Employers hiring software engineers
Company-specific question guides for employers that hire this role:
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