Be prepared to explain: 1. Stateless Authentication: Why JWTs are stateless, how refresh tokens work, and token revocation strategies. 2. Concurrency Control: Optimistic locking (version numbers) vs Pessimistic locking (SELECT FOR UPDATE). 3. Resiliency Patterns: Circuit breakers, exponential backoff with jitter, and dead-letter queues.
Identify your exact skill gaps and follow a milestone-by-milestone curriculum tailored to your target engineering track.
Explain trade-offs: Monoliths offer faster early development and simple transactional consistency. Microservices offer independent deployability and organizational scaling at the cost of network latency and distributed data complexity.
Continue leveling up your technical and job search skills.
Craft a high-signal backend resume focusing on system throughput, concurrency, database schema design, and cloud architecture.
A milestone-based progression covering languages, relational vs document databases, API protocols, caching, message queues, and cloud deployment.
A beginner-friendly guide to High-Level Design (HLD): load balancers, caching, database indexing, horizontal scaling, and microservices.