資深工程師多年未面試？面試變化與 8 週備考計劃

I built DevInterview.ai, one of the tools below, so I'm biased on that part.

If you're a senior engineer who hasn't interviewed in six years, I'd plan on six to eight weeks of part-time prep, starting with one full mock interview in the round you feel least sure of, to see how much it has rusted. The coding round still looks much as you remember it. What changed is the tooling around it, and at senior level more rides on system design and on stories that show the scope of your work.

What changed

• The practice tools moved. Pramp's free peer mocks are now part of Aced (formerly Exponent): Exponent acquired Pramp in November 2021, moved its sessions onto its own platform in July 2024, and renamed itself Aced in August 2026. Hello Interview wound down its human mock interviews on May 31, 2026.
• AI interviewers arrived. You can rehearse a full interview at 11 p.m. without booking anyone.
• AI may be in the room. Hello Interview now teaches a track it calls "AI Enabled Coding" and says Meta, Shopify, LinkedIn, Canva, Uber and others now sit you down with an AI assistant and a real codebase. Ask your recruiter whether your loop includes one, and practice the format they name.

What didn't change

• Coding is still code. Amazon's SDE II prep page still asks for syntactically correct code, not pseudocode, written in real time.
• Stories still decide a lot. Amazon tells SDE II candidates that each interviewer typically asks two or three behavioral questions about its Leadership Principles, framed with STAR.
• You know more than you can show. What rusts is speed: spotting a pattern in minutes and explaining a design out loud in 45.

The 8-week plan

At 8 to 10 hours a week alongside a full-time job:

• Week 1, diagnose: before studying anything, take one full mock interview at your target level in the round you feel least sure of. Spend more of the next weeks on whatever it flags.
• Weeks 1 to 4, patterns: the NeetCode 150 by pattern, a few problems a day, out loud from the first one.
• Weeks 2 to 6, system design: Hello Interview's free guides for the core concepts, then worked problems. Practice driving the design yourself: requirements, scale, and the tradeoffs you'd defend in a design review.
• Weeks 3 to 6, stories: 8 to 10 stories from your recent work that show scope: a project you led, a conflict you resolved, a call you got wrong and fixed.
• Weeks 5 to 8, full mocks: two a week, then most days in the final two weeks, mixing coding, system design and behavioral.
• Week 8, super optional: one session with an experienced interviewer on interviewing.io, from $179, for a human read.

Practice at the level you're targeting

DevInterview.ai runs interviews at three levels, Junior, Mid/Senior and Staff/Lead, and the level changes both the questions and the bar you're scored against. If you're unsure whether to aim for senior or staff, take one mock at each and compare the reports. System design runs 45 minutes on a canvas, set to your target company and level. The behavioral round asks five questions calibrated to your level, with follow-ups. First interview free, then $19.99 a month.

Where it falls short: the interviewer is an AI. You get repetitions and the same rubric every time, not the read of someone who runs hiring loops at your target company.

The tools, one per step

NeetCode for patterns (free list and videos; Pro $119/yr, list $199), Hello Interview for system design (free to start; Premium at list price $59 for 1 month, $119 for 1 year or $399 lifetime, with a sale running when I checked), DevInterview.ai to practice out loud, and, super optional, one interviewing.io session. The full plan is here.

Checked on each company's own pages on October 13 and 14, 2026. The full article, with sources, is on devinterview.ai.