SWE interview prep: How to research the company

Most candidates treat company research as an afterthought. But the right context helps you speak more thoughtfully, ask sharper questions, and understand the environment you’re stepping into. 

You don’t need days of digging — just a clear workflow. 

Here’s a practical, repeatable process you can use for any company.

Start with the fundamentals

Before diving into anything technical, build a foundational picture of the company. This sets the stage for every conversation you’ll have during the interview process.

What to look for

• Company size and stage: Startup ≠ mid-stage ≠ enterprise. Each brings different expectations, risk levels, and development practices.
• Funding and financial health: You want a sense of whether the company is growing, stabilizing, or recalibrating.
• Mission and direction: What the company says its priorities are — and where it claims it's going.
• Recent announcements: Launches, pivots, partnerships, leadership changes, or strategic shifts.

How to find it

• Home page → About, Mission, or Story: This helps you see what the company emphasizes publicly.
• Crunchbase / PitchBook: Scan for total funding, investor reputation, and timing between rounds.
• Google News (past 12 months): Quickly surfaces major events or directional shifts.
• LinkedIn company page: Look at headcount trends over time; rapid changes signal momentum or restructuring.

Understanding fundamentals tells you a lot about the type of environment you're entering:

• Is this a company figuring out product-market fit?
• Is this an organization optimizing a mature product?
• Is the team likely to move fast, or do they operate with more process and guardrails?
• Are there external pressures (e.g., layoffs, competitive threats, investor scrutiny)?

Even a few minutes of research helps you anchor your answers, avoid generic statements, and connect your motivations to something real.

Understand the product at a practical level

Before your interview, you need a grounded sense of what the product is, who it serves, and what problem it solves. Interviewers can immediately tell when a candidate hasn’t engaged with the product at all.

What to look for

• What job does this product do for users?
• Who depends on it, and why?
• What’s being launched or improved recently?
• How does the product fit into the broader market? What alternatives exist? What’s changing?

How to find it

• Product pages: Rewrite the product in your own words — if you can’t explain it simply, keep digging.
• User docs or help centers: These explain the product in practical terms instead of marketing language.
• Company blog: Look for product updates, changelog entries, or engineering writeups.
• YouTube demos or conference talks: Many companies showcase features or architecture decisions publicly.
• App Store or Play Store pages: For mobile products, reviews highlight user sentiment and common frustrations.

Understanding the product helps you:

• Frame your interview answers using the company’s real-world challenges.
• Show genuine interest without trying to sound impressive.
• Understand the tradeoffs the engineering team might be making.
• Ask questions that connect to the work the team is actually doing (not hypothetical work).

It also shows the interviewer that you're not here just for any job — you understand their job.

Understand company stability

Software teams don’t operate in a vacuum. Their pace, priorities, and expectations are shaped by the company’s financial and strategic reality. You don’t need to do a full financial analysis. Just gather enough signal to understand the environment.

What to look for

• Revenue model and core business lines
• Which products are essential vs. experimental
• Areas where the company appears to be investing heavily
• Layoff patterns or rapid shifts in hiring
• Traction indicators (user growth, partnerships, contracts)

How to find it

• Company website → “Customers” or “Solutions”: Reveals who pays and how.
• Earnings reports or shareholder letters: For public companies, skim the summary sections.
• Crunchbase funding timeline: Check how recent the last round was and its size.
• Interviews with executives: Leaders often speak directly about long-term priorities.
• Layoff trackers: See if the company has had recent reductions and in which orgs.
• Industry newsletters: Often provide contextualized analysis beyond the press release.

This helps you calibrate expectations and ask smarter questions during your interviews.

Research culture with realistic expectations

Culture isn’t one thing. It varies across teams, orgs, and even managers. Your goal isn’t to find the “truth” about the company; it’s to collect enough perspectives to understand the range of experiences.

What to look for

• How people describe the pace, expectations, and communication norms
• Whether the environment feels collaborative or siloed
• How onboarding and mentorship tend to work
• What engineers say about balancing quality and speed
• Whether experiences differ significantly between teams

How to find it

• Current employees on LinkedIn: Connect on LinkedIn and send short, respectful messages with one focused question, and ask about their day-to-day rather than anything confidential.
• Friends-of-friends: These informal chats often provide the most honest perspective.
• Glassdoor reviews: Look for repeated themes that appear across different time periods.
• Blind/Fishbowl posts: Pay attention to patterns rather than extreme opinions.
• Employee posts on LinkedIn: Notice how they talk about wins, launches, and team norms, as this often reveals cultural signals.

Use your research to ask stronger questions

When candidates ask smart questions, interviewers usually remember them. Not because the questions are clever, but because they show the kind of judgment engineers need to succeed on a real team.

What types of questions to ask

• On-call expectations
• Onboarding and mentorship
• Collaboration patterns
• How the team approaches experimentation, rollouts, and reversions
• What the team is prioritizing in the next 6–12 months

How to prepare those questions

• Read the engineering blog and note any recurring themes such as observability, experimentation, or reliability.
• Review the hiring manager’s LinkedIn profile to understand their previous teams and technical background.
• Look at recent product announcements and consider how they might shape upcoming work.
• Go through the job description and highlight any responsibilities or tools you want clarified.
• Scan the engineering-related Glassdoor reviews to identify workflow patterns or pain points worth asking about.

Questions rooted in research help you understand:

• How sustainable the workload is
• Whether the team invests in mentorship
• How confident leadership is about the roadmap
• What the team is measured on (impact, velocity, stability, etc.)
• How incidents and outages are handled

These are the things that truly affect your day-to-day experience, and most candidates never ask about them.

Turn your research into interview strength

When you approach research strategically, everything about the interview gets easier:

• Your “why this company” answer becomes specific and credible.
• Your system design and behavioral answers feel more grounded.
• Your questions signal maturity.
• You walk in with context, which reduces nerves and increases clarity.

Good research doesn’t need to be exhaustive. It just needs to be intentional. With a focused approach, you can build a clear picture of the company, understand the environment, and walk into every interview with confidence and context.

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