Backend Engineer practice interview
APIs, data modelling, reliability and incident handling for product backends. Practise the 5 questions interviewers ask for this role with follow-ups. Paid plans add scored feedback on every answer.
Free with an Intaviu account: 320 credits a month, at 10 credits a minute of practice. Private: interview creators never see them.
- Mid level
- 20 minutes
- 5 questions
- Scored feedback on paid plans
About the role
A backend engineer builds and runs the server side of a product: the APIs that apps call, the databases behind them and the jobs that run in the background. Day to day you design endpoints, model data, review code and keep services up when traffic spikes or something breaks. The panel wants to see how you reason about trade-offs and how you behave when production is on fire.
How to prepare
- Pick two systems you have built and be ready to sketch how a request flows through them, from client to database and back.
- Revise the basics of database design: indexes, transactions, normalisation and when you would bend the rules for speed.
- Prepare one incident story with a clear timeline: what alerted you, how you found the cause, the fix and what changed afterwards.
- Practise explaining a technical decision to a non-engineer in two or three plain sentences.
- Think through how your API behaves on slow or dropped connections, since many of your users are on patchy mobile data.
Common mistakes
- Listing tools and frameworks without explaining why you chose them or what you gave up.
- Saying 'we' for everything, so the panel cannot tell what you personally built or decided.
- Jumping straight into a design without first asking about scale, users and constraints.
What to expect
A real first-round interview
5 questions the way interviewers ask for this role, with follow-ups when an answer needs more.
Spoken, like the real thing
Speak your answers in your browser or the free desktop app, with live captions. You can ask the interviewer to repeat anything.
Scored on 5 areas
The things this interview weighs most. With a paid plan, your report shows how you did on each one.
A private report
On Plus, Pro and Premium: every answer scored, your strongest lines quoted and what to say differently next time. Interview creators never see it.
More engineering practice
Full-stack Engineer
Web front ends, APIs, databases and shipping complete features end to end.
EngineeringJunior Backend Developer (Python)
Python services, REST APIs, database queries, validation and systematic debugging of backend faults.
EngineeringIntegration Engineer (SaaS)
API integration design, customer data mapping, authentication, troubleshooting and reliable SaaS delivery.