Backend developer interview preparation, round by round
Backend interviews focus on system design, low-level design and your stack, such as Java and Spring, Node.js or Go. Expect SQL and database questions too, and usually one or two DSA rounds.
45 resources · 35 free · plus 23 for every role · Links checked 15 October 2026 · How we pick
Change role
- Software engineer 54 resources
- Backend developer 45 resources
- Frontend developer 37 resources
- Full stack developer 43 resources
- Mobile developer 19 resources
- DevOps and SRE 24 resources
- Data engineer 23 resources
- Data analyst 21 resources
- Data scientist 24 resources
- ML engineer 31 resources
- AI engineer 27 resources
- QA and SDET 12 resources
Start here
Three resources, in this order. Everything below is for going deeper on one round.
- The System Design Primer
GitHub repo · Free
Most backend loops have at least one system design round. Start here to learn caching, queues, sharding and their trade-offs.
- roadmap.sh interview question guides
Website · Free
It has answered question guides for Java, Spring Boot, Node.js, Go and SQL, so you can revise the exact stack on your resume.
- NeetCode Roadmap (NeetCode 150)
Website · Free tier
Backend loops still include one or two DSA rounds. The 150-problem list and its videos are free and cover the main patterns.
Nothing matches these filters. Use Show all to see every resource again.
System design 23 resources
Designing a large service: APIs, data, scaling and the trade-offs between options
The System Design Primer
GitHub repo · donnemartin/system-design-primer
A free, community-maintained study guide that explains scalability building blocks and their trade-offs, applies them to sample problems, and ships Anki decks for revision.
Best for the first stop for any high-level design round, and the reference you keep returning to
roadmap.sh interview question guides
Website · roadmap.sh
Free topic-by-topic Q&A guides with quiz cards, from backend, frontend, Java, Spring Boot, Go, Python and Node.js to SQL, Kubernetes, DevOps and data analysis.
Best for quick topic-wise revision of language, framework and tool questions before an interview
Also in Java, Spring, Node.js and Go questions, SQL
Amazon - How We Hire (role-specific interview prep)
Official guide · amazon.jobs
Amazon's hiring hub, explaining each stage from application to the final loop, with role-specific prep pages for SDE, front-end, BI engineer and scientist roles.
Best for finding out what Amazon tests for your role and level, and how its loop works
Also in Coding and DSA, Resume, companies and offers
Atlassian - Engineering interviews
Official guide · atlassian.com
Atlassian's walkthrough of each engineering round, from two coding parts and system design to a manager chat, a values interview and the hiring committee.
Best for Atlassian candidates (it has a large Bengaluru hub) and anyone curious what a values interview is like
Also in LLD and machine coding, Coding and DSA, Resume, companies and offers
Awesome Scalability
GitHub repo · binhnguyennus/awesome-scalability
A long reading list of real engineering-blog posts and talks on scaling, availability, stability and performance, grouped by principle and by company.
Best for collecting real-world examples to cite in senior design interviews
Back-End Developer Interview Questions
GitHub repo · arialdomartini/Back-End-Developer-Interview-Questions
Hundreds of open-ended prompts on design patterns, code design, APIs, databases, concurrency, distributed systems and security, meant to start a discussion, not test recall.
Best for mid-level backend candidates practising how to reason out loud about trade-offs
Also in LLD and machine coding, Java, Spring, Node.js and Go questions, Core CS
Awesome Engineering Articles (AlgoMaster)
GitHub repo · ashishps1/awesome-engineering-articles
Roughly 340 hand-picked engineering-blog posts tabulated by company, topic and year, including Indian firms such as Flipkart, Razorpay, Swiggy and Zomato.
Best for reading how the company you are interviewing with, or a close peer, built its systems
Azure Architecture Center: Cloud Design Patterns
Official guide · learn.microsoft.com
Microsoft's catalogue of distributed-system patterns such as circuit breaker, CQRS, saga, sharding and queue-based load levelling, each with when it helps and what it costs.
Best for naming and justifying reliability and scalability patterns precisely in a design round
interviewing.io: A Senior Engineer's Guide to the System Design Interview
Website · interviewing.io
A free multi-part guide, built on a large pool of real mock interviews, on how design rounds are scored, how to steer an open problem and which 15 fundamentals to master.
Best for SDE-2 and above who know the concepts but want to know how they are judged
Meta Careers - Preparing for your full loop (SWE)
Official guide · metacareers.com
Meta's official prep page for software engineers who have reached the onsite stage, whose main value is the free Full Loop Interview Guide it links to.
Best for candidates with a Meta onsite scheduled (confirm the exact rounds with your recruiter)
Also in Coding and DSA, Resume, companies and offers
Hello Interview: System Design in a Hurry
Website · hellointerview.com
A condensed course by former big-tech interviewers that teaches an answer framework, core concepts and recurring patterns, then applies them in full problem walkthroughs.
Best for candidates with one to four weeks who want high-yield material and a repeatable answer structure
System Design Interview, Vol. 1 & 2 (Alex Xu / ByteByteGo)
Book · bytebytego.com
Two volumes of fully worked design answers, from a rate limiter and chat to payments and a stock exchange, built on a four-step framework and also sold as a course.
Best for seeing many complete, interview-length answers to common design questions
System Design Resources (InterviewReady / Gaurav Sen)
GitHub repo · InterviewReady/system-design-resources
A topic-organised list of the original papers and engineering posts behind rate limiting, message queues, service meshes, distributed transactions and replication.
Best for going past video summaries before a senior or staff-level design round
Amazon Builders' Library
Official guide · builder.aws.com
Essays by senior Amazon engineers on running services in production: timeouts and retries with jitter, load shedding, caching pitfalls, leader election and safe deployments.
Best for senior candidates who want production-grade answers on resilience and operations
Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition
Book · martin.kleppmann.com
The standard deep dive on storage engines, replication, partitioning, transactions, consistency and stream processing, updated in a 2026 second edition with Chris Riccomini.
Best for real depth for senior backend and data-engineering design rounds (read selected chapters)
Also in Core CS
Concept && Coding by Shrayansh (YouTube)
YouTube channel · youtube.com
Basics-to-advanced playlists on low-level design (patterns, UML, Splitwise, BookMyShow) and high-level design, mostly in Hindi with an English-dubbed LLD series.
Best for Hindi-speaking candidates preparing LLD and machine-coding rounds at Indian product companies
Also in LLD and machine coding
Arpit Bhayani (YouTube)
YouTube channel · youtube.com
First-principles videos on database internals, microservices, distributed algorithms, and teardowns of engineering blogs and outages.
Best for SDE-2 and above who want to explain the reasoning behind design choices, not just draw boxes
Distributed Systems lecture series (Martin Kleppmann, Cambridge)
Course · youtube.com
A compact Cambridge lecture series with free notes covering RPC, clocks, broadcast, replication, quorums, Raft, two-phase commit and consistency models.
Best for a shorter, more watchable alternative to MIT 6.5840 on consistency and consensus
Hussein Nasser (YouTube)
YouTube channel · youtube.com
Long-form backend fundamentals on protocols (HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSockets), proxies and load balancers, connection pooling and database internals.
Best for backend candidates grilled on protocol and database choices in fundamentals or design rounds
Also in Java, Spring, Node.js and Go questions, Core CS
Jordan has no life (YouTube)
YouTube channel · youtube.com
Detailed, opinionated walkthroughs of distributed-systems concepts and full design problems that go deeper on data models and trade-offs than most channels.
Best for senior candidates targeting FAANG-level design rounds (use the current 2.0 and 3.0 playlists)
Also in LLD and machine coding
MIT 6.5840: Distributed Systems
Course · pdos.csail.mit.edu
MIT's graduate distributed-systems course with free lecture notes, paper readings and Go labs where you build MapReduce, Raft and a fault-tolerant sharded key-value store.
Best for engineers aiming at infrastructure or staff roles who want first-principles depth on consensus
Aced Practice (formerly Exponent; Pramp moved here)
Practice site · aced.io
Free peer mock interviews where you pair with another candidate and take turns as interviewer, in DSA, system design, behavioral, SQL, data science, ML and frontend.
Best for regular, cheap live practice and a feel for the interviewer's side of the table
Also in SQL, Coding and DSA
interviewing.io - Mock interview replays
Practice site · interviewing.io
A free library of recorded, anonymised mock interviews run by big-tech engineers, filterable by company, round and level, with paid live mocks available.
Best for watching real interviewer feedback on coding, design and behavioral rounds before your own mocks
Also in Coding and DSA
LLD and machine coding 4 resources
Class design, design patterns, and building a small working app in about 90 minutes
Refactoring.Guru: Design Patterns
Website · refactoring.guru
A free, illustrated catalogue of the 22 classic design patterns, each with the problem it solves, a structure diagram, trade-offs and sample code in many languages.
Best for learning or revising design patterns before LLD rounds
Awesome Low Level Design (AlgoMaster)
GitHub repo · ashishps1/awesome-low-level-design
A free LLD repo covering OOP, SOLID, design patterns, UML and concurrency, plus 30+ classic problems like parking lot, elevator and Splitwise solved in six languages.
Best for LLD and machine-coding rounds at Indian product companies, with worked code to compare against
workat.tech Machine Coding Problems
Website · workat.tech
Ten original machine-coding problem statements, such as Splitwise, Snake and Ladder and an in-memory key-value store, with precise specs modelled on Indian product-company rounds.
Best for timed 90-minute self-practice for Flipkart-style machine-coding rounds
Hello Interview: Low-Level Design in a Hurry
Website · hellointerview.com
A short primer on object-oriented design rounds covering scoping, finding entities and classes, and worked problems, with notes on how India and Asia rounds differ.
Best for last-mile LLD prep when you know OOP basics and need an interview structure
Java, Spring, Node.js and Go questions 5 resources
Questions on your stack: languages, frameworks, cloud, testing and data tools
Node.js Best Practices
GitHub repo · goldbergyoni/nodebestpractices
A large, explained checklist of Node.js production practices covering project layout, error handling, testing, security, performance and deployment.
Best for Node.js candidates who must justify architecture, error-handling and production decisions
Baeldung interview question guides (Java and Spring)
Website · baeldung.com
In-depth Q&A articles with code samples on core Java, collections, concurrency, generics, JVM memory, Spring, Spring Boot and Spring MVC.
Best for Java and Spring candidates who want accurate, example-backed answers over one-line Q&A
The Practical Test Pyramid
Blog · martinfowler.com
Ham Vocke's long-form guide to splitting tests across unit, integration, contract and end-to-end layers, with worked code and the trade-offs of each layer.
Best for 'how would you design a test strategy?' in SDET and backend interviews
100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Website · 100go.co
A free web summary of 100 common Go errors, from variable shadowing and slice aliasing to goroutine leaks and testing mistakes, with the full book sold separately.
Best for Go backend and platform candidates preparing language-depth and code-review questions
Telusko (YouTube)
YouTube channel · youtube.com
Navin Reddy's channel of long, free video courses on Java, Spring, Spring Boot, microservices and related backend tools.
Best for Indian freshers and early-career Java developers getting Java and Spring interview-ready
SQL 4 resources
Writing queries with joins, grouping and window functions on realistic tables
Use The Index, Luke
Book · use-the-index-luke.com
Markus Winand's free online book on how B-tree indexes behave and how to write queries that use them, with notes for Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server.
Best for 'why is this query slow?' and 'how would you index this?' questions
Also in Core CS
LeetCode SQL 50 study plan
Practice site · leetcode.com
Fifty judged SQL problems in seven groups, from selects and joins to aggregates, subqueries and string functions, mostly easy, as a first structured pass.
Best for a first structured set of SQL interview problems for any data or backend role
LeetCode
Practice site · leetcode.com
The default site for interview-style coding practice: thousands of problems, free study plans such as Top Interview 150 and SQL 50, and weekly contests.
Best for daily practice and timed contests (Premium mainly adds company-tagged lists)
Also in Coding and DSA
PostgreSQL Exercises
Practice site · pgexercises.com
Learn-by-doing exercises on one sample database in real PostgreSQL, covering joins, subqueries, aggregates, window functions, dates, strings and recursive queries.
Best for backend developers who want realistic Postgres practice beyond single-table toy problems
Core CS 3 resources
Operating systems, DBMS, computer networks and OOP basics
What happens when you type google.com
GitHub repo · alex/what-happens-when
A crowd-written, step-by-step account of everything from the keypress through DNS, TCP, TLS and HTTP to the browser parsing and painting the page.
Best for answering the classic 'what happens when you load a URL' question with depth
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (OSTEP)
Book · pages.cs.wisc.edu
A free, very readable operating systems textbook from two University of Wisconsin professors, covering processes, scheduling, memory, concurrency and file systems.
Best for actually understanding OS concepts instead of memorising one-line answers
Kurose and Ross Computer Networking Video Lectures
Course · gaia.cs.umass.edu
Free video lectures and slides from the authors of the most widely used networking textbook, covering the application, transport, network and link layers.
Best for a solid grasp of TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS and routing for networking questions
Coding and DSA 5 resources
Solving problems with data structures and algorithms, and explaining your approach
NeetCode Roadmap (NeetCode 150)
Website · neetcode.io
A visual topic map of 150 core LeetCode problems, each linked to a free video walkthrough on the NeetCode YouTube channel.
Best for learning problem patterns topic by topic, with a video solution for every problem
Striver's A2Z DSA Sheet (takeUforward)
Website · takeuforward.org
An ordered DSA curriculum of roughly 500 topics in 20 modules, from language basics and sorting through graphs, DP and tries, taught by Raj Vikramaditya (Striver).
Best for Indian freshers starting DSA from zero who want one ordered path
Tech Interview Handbook
Website · techinterviewhandbook.org
An open-source guide to the whole software interview process, from picking a language and drilling algorithm topics to resumes, behavioral answers and offer negotiation.
Best for planning your coding-interview prep from start to finish
Also in Resume, companies and offers
Grind 75
Website · techinterviewhandbook.org
A study-plan generator that turns a ranked list of high-frequency LeetCode problems into a week-by-week schedule sized to the hours you have.
Best for candidates with a fixed number of weeks who want the highest-value problem list
Canva - "Yes, you can use AI in our interviews"
Official guide · canva.dev
A Canva engineering post on why it now expects backend, frontend and ML candidates to use AI coding tools in interviews, and what interviewers assess instead.
Best for understanding AI-assisted coding rounds and how to show good judgement with an AI tool
Also in Resume, companies and offers
Resume, companies and offers 1 resource
Getting shortlisted, researching companies, and comparing and negotiating offers
interviewing.io - Senior engineer's guide to FAANG interviews
Website · interviewing.io
A free long-read built from talks with FAANG interviewers that compares how Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google and Microsoft run their loops and team matching.
Best for experienced engineers planning a FAANG or big-tech job search end to end
Same for every role
Behavioral rounds, resumes, pay and company guides do not change with the job. These 23 live on the interview resources hub.
Behavioral and HR
- GeeksforGeeks - HR interview questions
- Microsoft Careers - Interview tips
- MIT CAPD - The STAR method for behavioral interviews
- Tech Interview Handbook - Behavioral interviews
- reverse-interview
- Amazon Leadership Principles
- Google Careers - Interview tips
- Jeff H Sipe - Practice Interviews (YouTube)
- A Life Engineered (Steve Huynh, YouTube)
Practice and communities
Resume, companies and offers
- Tech Interview Handbook - Software engineer resume guide
- Reactive Resume
- Jake's Resume (LaTeX template on Overleaf)
- Hiring Without Whiteboards
- r/developersIndia Community Wiki
- AmbitionBox
- Anthropic - Candidate AI guidance
- Haseeb Qureshi - Ten rules for negotiating a job offer
- Thoughtworks India - AI policy for recruitment
- Levels.fyi - Software engineer pay in India
- r/EngineeringResumes wiki
From the team that keeps this list
Helpwing is a desktop app for interviews where AI help is allowed: it hears the question and drafts an answer from your resume. It is not for online assessments or tests.