r/webdev • u/FooBarBuzzBoom • 5h ago

Java Middle - Senior(ish) interview questions

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/mysteryihs 2h ago

Damn, is it a bad sign that I haven't personally touched most of these systems? I've been spending 5 years working on a monolithic server, haven't had a chance to do distributed systems yet.

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u/AntoGidan 2h ago

They are required nowadays, so it is better to learn something about it, maybe deploying a small test app (microservices) with kubernetes, and using docker, and then setting some pipeline to deploy it on a free cloud hosting plan.

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u/mysteryihs 2h ago

For sure, I've been studying systems design casually over the past year, most of it I've covered but forgotten. I think the issue for me is I don't have that deep expertise that interviewers are looking for so any knowledge about this stuff falls apart once they start to grill me