Software Developer — Backend Craft

What this session covers

• API design
• Testing
• Performance
• Refactoring
• Code review

Questions you'll face

1. 1. Describe a piece of code you owned that became hard to change. What made it hard, and how did you address it?

   ~3 min

   Looks for concrete design judgement rather than textbook principles.

2. 2. You are designing a REST or RPC API for a resource other teams will consume for years. What decisions do you make on day one and why?

   ~3 min

   Checks interface thinking: versioning, pagination, errors, idempotency.

3. 3. Where do you draw the line between unit, integration and end-to-end tests on a service you own?

   ~3 min

   Tests pragmatic testing strategy and cost awareness.

4. 4. A request that should take 80ms is taking 2 seconds under load. How do you find out why?

   ~3 min

   Assesses systematic debugging under production constraints.

5. 5. Tell me about a technical disagreement with a teammate where you turned out to be wrong.

   ~3 min

   Behavioural signal on humility and collaboration quality.

How the time is spent

1. 1

   Warm-up & context · 4 min

   Interviewer intro, your background, how the session runs.

2. 2

   Core questions · 24 min

   Role-specific questions with live follow-ups based on your answers.

3. 3

   Deep dive · 8 min

   One topic explored to the edge of your experience.

4. 4

   Your questions & wrap · 4 min

   Close the loop and hand over to feedback generation.