Interview questions
Engineering
Backend Engineer interview questions
These questions probe a backend engineer's understanding of API design, databases, concurrency, and building systems that stay reliable under load.
12 questions across 4 stages.
Phone screen
- 1Describe a service you own — its responsibilities and who depends on it.
- 2What languages and datastores are you strongest in?
- 3How do you think about API versioning and backward compatibility?
Technical
- 1When would you choose a relational database over a document or key-value store?
- 2How do you design an idempotent endpoint, and why does it matter?
- 3Walk through how you'd add caching to a read-heavy endpoint.
- 4How do you handle a long-running job triggered by an API request?
- 5What does your approach to observability (logs, metrics, traces) look like?
Behavioral
- 1Tell me about an outage you helped resolve — what was the root cause and the fix?
- 2Describe a time you had to pay down technical debt. How did you justify it?
Situational
- 1A query that was fast is now timing out as data grew. How do you approach it?
- 2You need to change a schema used by three other teams. How do you roll it out safely?
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