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A staged curriculum that takes a working junior backend engineer to a senior backend interview loop. Strengthens the algorithms and data-structures floor, builds the database and distributed-systems vocabulary senior interviewers expect, climbs through coding difficulty, and finishes with the system-design and behavioral evidence that decides senior offers.
Most senior backend loops still open with a coding round. Refresh the patterns first - hash maps, two pointers, binary search, BFS/DFS - before climbing into systems work.
Warm-up problems that lock in the core patterns: hash maps, two pointers, simple traversals. If any of these feel uncertain, slow down here - the senior loop assumes these are reflexive.
Mid-tier coding problems are where most senior loops get decided. Aim to finish each in ~25 minutes with a clean solution and a concrete time/space analysis.
Hard problems test whether you can structure an unfamiliar problem under pressure. You will not always finish - that is fine. Practice the framing, identify the right pattern, and code the cleanest correct version you can.
Senior backend interviews assume fluency with indexing, transactions, and the trade-offs between SQL and NoSQL. Anchor these before stepping into system design.
The bounded designs that show up in mid-to-senior loops. Each walkthrough covers requirements, capacity estimation, architecture, and trade-offs - the structure interviewers grade against.
Senior backend offers turn on whether you can show ownership, push back when warranted, and learn from incidents. Build STAR answers around these themes before the loop.
Three role-targeted paths are live: Backend, SRE / DevOps, and ML Engineer. More are on the way - if you have a role you want covered, let us know.
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