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Senior Backend Engineer Interview Questions

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2,785 senior backend engineer interview questions shared by candidates

There are different sort of questions depending on the interview step you're in. For example, on the interview with a Team Lead you might be asked what makes a great engineer and on the debrief session you'll discuss the solution to the given task and the questions may be about typical distributed systems problems.
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Senior Ruby Backend Developer

Interviewed at Qonto

4.3★
Mar 10, 2023

There are different sort of questions depending on the interview step you're in. For example, on the interview with a Team Lead you might be asked what makes a great engineer and on the debrief session you'll discuss the solution to the given task and the questions may be about typical distributed systems problems.

Different ways to implement and manage threads in Java? Pros and cons of each approach. Why a thread pool size shouldn't be too large or too small? Different way of distributing/batching work across threads. Scaling with queues and databases. How would you implement a distributed rate limiter? (Hint: learn the rate-limiting algorithms). Pros and cons for every question asked.
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Senior Backend Engineer

Interviewed at Monzo Bank

3.9★
Feb 12, 2026

Different ways to implement and manage threads in Java? Pros and cons of each approach. Why a thread pool size shouldn't be too large or too small? Different way of distributing/batching work across threads. Scaling with queues and databases. How would you implement a distributed rate limiter? (Hint: learn the rate-limiting algorithms). Pros and cons for every question asked.

Design a system that tracks files stored in S3. Given two API endpoints—one that lists the files and another that provides details such as file size—design a system that counts the total number of files and calculates their combined size.
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Senior Backend Engineer

Interviewed at Cyera

4.5★
Mar 8, 2025

Design a system that tracks files stored in S3. Given two API endpoints—one that lists the files and another that provides details such as file size—design a system that counts the total number of files and calculates their combined size.

Check if string contains the exact same number of repetitions of every character. I.e. "aabb" - true, "aabbc" - false. Then check if removing a single character from the string can make it valid, i.e. "aabbc" - true, "aaabbbcc" - false
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Senior Backend Engineer

Interviewed at Bolt

3.4★
Dec 13, 2019

Check if string contains the exact same number of repetitions of every character. I.e. "aabb" - true, "aabbc" - false. Then check if removing a single character from the string can make it valid, i.e. "aabbc" - true, "aaabbbcc" - false

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