Assess backend skills: API design, databases, concurrency, and system thinking.
Evaluates ability to design clean, consistent APIs and understanding of API design principles.
Candidate demonstrates clear understanding of resource modeling, HTTP semantics, idempotency, and pagination. They discuss real trade-offs rather than stating one approach is always better.
Candidate cannot explain REST constraints beyond 'use GET and POST', confuses HTTP status codes, or has no strategy for API evolution and versioning.
Assesses knowledge of data modeling, indexing strategies, and query performance tuning.
Candidate discusses normalization trade-offs, indexing strategies with specifics (composite indexes, covering indexes), and uses EXPLAIN plans. They can reason about when denormalization is appropriate.
Candidate cannot explain indexing beyond 'it makes things faster', has no strategy for schema design, or has never profiled a slow query.
Evaluates understanding of concurrency patterns, race conditions, and basic distributed systems concepts.
Candidate explains locking mechanisms, transaction isolation levels, or queue-based approaches with concrete examples. They understand the trade-offs between consistency and availability.
Candidate has never considered concurrency, confuses threads and processes, or cannot describe a situation where data consistency was a concern.
Assesses approach to building resilient services with proper error handling, logging, and monitoring.
Candidate describes structured logging, correlation IDs, health checks, and alerting strategies. They have a systematic debugging approach and understand the difference between errors, warnings, and info logs.
Candidate relies on console.log for debugging, has no monitoring strategy, or cannot describe how they would investigate a production incident.
Evaluates awareness of common backend security concerns and secure coding practices.
Candidate identifies OWASP Top 10 concerns naturally (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF), explains JWT vs. session-based auth trade-offs, and has a strategy for secrets management (vault, env vars, never in code).
Candidate has never thought about SQL injection, stores passwords in plain text, or commits secrets to version control without concern.
Interview notes go here...
Design and implement server-side logic, APIs, and database integrations.
Develop and maintain enterprise Java applications using Spring Boot and microservices.
Create high-performance backend services and APIs using Node.js and TypeScript.