Secureworks Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

It started with a phone screen, then a take-home assignment that took up about 4 hours of my Saturday. I did all the work, including a detailed README explaining my thoughts and design, unit and integration tests with Googletest, and even a sample Jenkins CI/CD pipeline. After putting in a lot of work, I didn't hear back for weeks. HR finally asked if I wanted to proceed with final interviews. I said no because the lack of communication and respect for my time was a bad sign. The 'final' stage had 3.5 hours of back-to-back 1:1 technical interviews, which felt like a lot given the take-home already showed my systems programming skills. Given the assignment's scope and Secureworks' focus, I couldn't help but wonder if the work was reused internally, but that's just me guessing. My advice to other engineers: be careful with long take-home assignments unless it's clearly a simple problem or you're sure the company is worth the effort.

So after a quick 30min phone screen, I had this big interview block that was like 4-5 hours long. It was split into 5 separate meetings, each about 45-60 minutes each. They dug into my past work, asked some casual questions like about hobbies, and also tested my deeper technical knowledge. They threw in two questions about problem-solving skills. Pretty clear they're looking for solid technical chops. On the downside, nobody even offered me a drink, not even water, during those long sessions. And the worst part is HR was supposed to get back to me in a few days, but I heard nothing. I've emailed and called them multiple times over two months and still no word from SecureWorks. It makes me wonder if they even have actual openings or if they're just building a candidate database for the future.

The first part of the interview where they asked me about my past projects and stuff went really well. However, I struggled a bit with the technical interview. The interviewer was super nice and chill, making the whole experience really comfortable. They didn't focus too much on my technical abilities. I think I got the offer mainly because of my previous projects, my personality, and my problem-solving skills.