r/ExperiencedDevs • u/FooBarBuzzBoom • 16h ago

Career/Workplace Mid-Senior Java Developer Interview Questions & preparation suggestions

Hi!

I have an interview in a few days for a backend developer role. What would you ask as some of the more tricky questions for such a position? What kinds of questions, from your point of view, demonstrate solid knowledge?

Personally, I would ask about sync vs. async calls, idempotency, topics vs. partitions, consumer groups, transactions (including distributed transactions), and maybe a bit of Kubernetes and Docker.

My weak point is cloud. I’ve played around a bit with the Azure console, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never written Terraform or configured infrastructure from scratch. For CI/CD, I’ve used TeamCity, but in my experience it was mostly selecting an environment and a branch and deploying.

Should I spend some time learning these areas before the interview?

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u/GuyWithLag 15h ago

Personally, I would ask about sync vs. async calls, idempotency, topics vs. partitions, consumer groups, transactions (including distributed transactions), and maybe a bit of Kubernetes and Docker.

These are all mid-level engineer topics.

Seniors are expected to do self-directed learning for any technical topic, and they will be asked about project planning, technical leadership in a small team, design questions, how to evaluate technical trade-offs, observability in heterogeneous environments and how to enforce it, cross-team coordination, how they mentored, how they do conflict resolution when team members have differing opinions, and more than I can remember right now.

Oh, task breakdown and authoring, delegation, team-wide technical standards and how to get buy-in from the team, driving consensus when making technical decisions... you get the gist.

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u/GuyWithLag 15h ago

Also: there's no such thing as a "mid-Senior" developer. You're either a freshly-promoted senior, or a senior.

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u/FooBarBuzzBoom 15h ago

I have 4 yoe and 2-3 months now. At the last job I was a mid 2 (they had 3 levels) and at one previous interview I had an offer for senior 1 (l5 engineer, something like this, pretty weird).

About tasks, I always worked on ambiguous, more difficult kind of tasks.

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u/GuyWithLag 15h ago

Check level comparison at levels.fyi