Thirty vetted interview questions for Backend Engineer candidates covering API design, data modeling, performance, reliability, and collaboration, with strong-answer guidance.
Use these questions to interview Backend Engineer candidates at {{Company name}}. Group them by interviewer: API and data modeling suit a design-oriented session, performance and reliability suit a deep-dive with your most operationally experienced engineer. Everywhere, push past vocabulary to incidents and decisions the candidate personally owned.
What good looks like: strong candidates design contracts from the consumer's seat — explicit error shapes, pagination and versioning decided upfront, idempotency keys for anything money-shaped — and they own a story where their boundary or contract choice aged badly. Candidates who have never regretted a design have not shipped enough of them.
What good looks like: the best answers are measurement-first — profiles and percentiles before fixes, a named bottleneck, and numbers for before and after. Be wary of candidates who reach for horizontal scaling before understanding where the time goes, and of caching stories with no invalidation pain in them.
Not legal advice
This template is provided for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Laws differ by jurisdiction and change over time — have a qualified professional review any document before you rely on it.
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