Technology

Backend Developer Interview Questions

Prepare for your Backend Developer interview with these 8 commonly asked questions. Each includes expert tips on how to structure your answer.

2 Behavioral4 Technical2 Situational

Behavioral Questions

Describe a time you identified and resolved a significant performance bottleneck.

Walk through profiling, root cause analysis, the fix, and measurable improvement.

Tell me about a time you had to migrate a database with zero downtime.

Describe dual-write strategies, shadow tables, and rollback plans.

Technical Questions

How do you design a RESTful API that is both scalable and maintainable?

Discuss versioning, consistent naming, pagination, error handling, and documentation.

Explain the CAP theorem and how it influences your database design decisions.

Give concrete examples of when you would choose consistency over availability and vice versa.

What strategies do you use to ensure data integrity across distributed systems?

Cover transactions, idempotency, saga patterns, and eventual consistency.

How do you approach writing secure backend code?

Cover input validation, parameterized queries, authentication, authorization, and OWASP top 10.

Situational Questions

How would you handle a sudden 10x spike in API traffic?

Discuss auto-scaling, caching, rate limiting, queue-based processing, and graceful degradation.

A third-party API your service depends on starts returning errors intermittently. What do you do?

Discuss circuit breakers, retry logic with backoff, fallback responses, and alerting.

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