Get certified as a
Software EngineerBig Tech Readiness
Prove your ability to solve engineering problems, reason about systems at scale and make sound backend and production architecture decisions - across four parts, against a published competency blueprint.
Built for Software Engineer, Backend Engineer, Software Development Engineer and similar entry-level roles.
Join 100,000+ One Roadmap-certified candidates
The assessment
25 min
timed assessment
20
technical + scenario + case questions
4
assessment sections
75%
passing standard
You will be assessed on
9 competencies, scored separately
Not one number called “software engineer”. Your result reports a level for each of these, so you can pass overall and still see exactly where the gap is.
Algorithmic Problem Solving
Data structure and algorithm selection, and reasoning about complexity.
Code Reasoning & Debugging
Reading code for behaviour, defects and runtime cost.
Backend Engineering
API design, asynchronous work, service boundaries and the request lifecycle.
Database & Storage
Indexes, transactions, locking, storage engines and replication trade-offs.
Concurrency
Race conditions, synchronisation, contention, deadlocks and backpressure.
Distributed Systems
Queues, partitioning, consistency, idempotency and fault tolerance.
Scalable System Design
Caching, rate limiting, CDNs and architecture under scale.
Reliability Engineering
Timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, degradation and failure isolation.
Engineering Judgment
Balancing correctness, performance, complexity, cost and maintainability.
Assessment standard
Every attempt draws a fresh paper - but always the same number of questions from each competency area, so nobody gets an easier test.
Algorithms & Code Reasoning
Choosing the right structure, reasoning about cost, and reading code for what it actually does.
- Algorithms & Data Structures4
- Code Analysis & Debugging2
You must score at least 60% here, whatever your overall total.
System Design & Distributed Systems
Architecture under scale, and what changes once a system spans more than one machine.
- System Design4
- Distributed Systems2
Backend, Data & Reliability
Indexes, locks, contention and API contracts - the things that break in production.
- Database & Storage2
- Concurrency1
- API & Reliability2
Applied Software Engineering
Three production situations you answer in your own words: what you would do first, and why.
- Applied Engineering Cases3
You must score at least 60% here, whatever your overall total.
Assessment version
SWE-BIGTECH-v2
Question bank
83 randomized items
Passing standard
75% weighted
Result bands
Distinction / Strong Performance / Certified
Result bands describe performance on this assessment. They are not a measure of employability or hiring outcomes.
Learning outcomes
These are what the public verification page reports - and each one is claimed only where your own attempt evidenced it.
Algorithmic Problem Solving
Demonstrated ability to select appropriate data structures and algorithms and reason about their time and space complexity.
Code Reasoning & Debugging
Demonstrated ability to analyze code behavior, identify implementation defects and reason about performance characteristics.
Backend Engineering
Demonstrated understanding of API architecture, asynchronous workflows, service communication and backend design patterns.
Database & Storage Systems
Demonstrated judgment around indexes, transactions, storage engines, locking, replication and database design trade-offs.
Concurrency
Demonstrated understanding of race conditions, synchronization, resource contention, deadlocks and concurrent workload design.
Distributed Systems
Demonstrated understanding of queues, consistency, partitioning, replication, idempotency and distributed failure handling.
Scalable System Design
Demonstrated ability to reason about caching, rate limiting, CDNs, asynchronous processing and architecture under scale.
Software Reliability
Demonstrated understanding of retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, graceful degradation and production failure isolation.
Engineering Judgment
Demonstrated ability to balance correctness, performance, scalability, complexity and maintainability when making engineering decisions.
How the written cases are graded
A model reading your answer and returning “8.7 out of 10” is not a grade - it is a guess with a decimal point. So we split the job in two: the AI only observes, and the code scores.
The evaluator reports which engineering decisions it can evidence in your own words - rolled back before debugging, read the execution plan, made the retry idempotent, separated critical from non-critical dependencies. It has no score field to write into. Points come from a fixed rubric in code, so naming a pattern with no reasoning behind it earns nothing.
Your written case answer
50-100 words, in your own words, in the time you have.
AI evaluator
Reports only which expected behaviours are evidenced, and which red flags appear.
Deterministic rubric
Code turns those observations into points, using the bank's own signal list.
Weighted result + competency profile
Part A 30%, Part B 30%, Part C 25%, Part D 15% decides the 75% pass mark; the same answers roll up into a level for each competency.
Weekly Ranking
Frequently asked questions
Free, 25 minutes, and a verifiable credential at the end.
This is an independent OneRoadmap competency credential. It is not issued, sponsored, approved or endorsed by Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix or any other technology company.