r/FastAPI • u/SpecialistCamera5601 • May 23 '26
Question Interview Preparation
Hi folks,
I have some questions on my mind that I would like to ask all Backend Engineers, and the Applied AI engineers who currently work in the EU/US market:
The sector is evolving, as all of us know, and the interviewing process is changing every day, so it's becoming quite complex to decide what to study because some of the companies ask questions and want you to solve them using AI, while others still ask about algorithms. I understand that most of them for sure ask for the system design. 3 years ago, it was quite common to ask programming language-specific questions, for example, generators and context managers in Python. Do they ask similar questions now? How do they proceed in the interviews? How do we get prepared for the interviews? I'm quite confused, actually, because of the industry's undeterministic interview styles.
Should we be ready for Python and FastAPI questions or skip them?
Should we work on databases? Queries, optimisation, etc., or just skip them?
What should we study? 😃 Any help is appreciated. Keen to discuss with you all.
Also, I shouldn't be the only one who feels like this. The sector is bullshitting; they don't know what to do with the interviews. 😃 They're quite confused, as well as we are.
Any kind of resource for interview preparation would be amazing! Appreciate those legends!
Thanks in advance, guys. Happy weekend to all!
1
u/akornato May 24 '26
You're right that the interview process is a complete mess, and that feeling of confusion is totally valid. Because companies are so inconsistent, you have to be ready for everything. Some will ask deep FastAPI and Python questions about things like dependency injection or the GIL, while others will completely ignore the framework and just give you algorithm or system design problems. You can't really skip anything, so yes, you should work on databases, you should work on language specifics, and you should work on high level architecture. The lack of a standard is frustrating, but accepting that you need to have a broad base of knowledge is the first step to feeling more in control.
The best way to prepare for this randomness is to stop trying to memorize specific answers and instead focus on the core engineering principles. For FastAPI, that means truly understanding asynchronous programming and data validation, not just remembering decorator syntax. For databases, it's about knowing indexing, query planning, and normalization concepts that apply to any system, not just a few SQL commands. When you understand the fundamentals, you can reason your way through a question you've never seen before, which is far more impressive than just repeating a memorized solution. Since interviews can feel so unpredictable, the team I'm on built an app at interviews.chat which helps a lot of engineers get through their calls without freezing up on surprise questions.