Question 1

Walk me through how you'd design a rate-limited API for a multi-tenant SaaS product.

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Question 2

Tell me about a time you debugged a production performance issue. What was the root cause and how did you fix it?

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Question 3

How do you decide between a relational store, a document store, and a key-value cache for a new service?

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Question 4

Describe your approach to observability and on-call across the services you've owned.

Accepted Answer

Listen for: structured problem-framing, trade-off awareness, specific metrics or outcomes, and evidence of ownership beyond just the code.

Back End Engineer interview questions

Questions to ask a back end engineer