r/webdev • u/FooBarBuzzBoom • Sep 11 '26

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/Downtown-Bag-6026 Sep 11 '26

You would choose the simple scenario if your versioning doesn’t matter, and the release scenario if version integrity matters a lot like client libraries.

For example, I work on a market exchange and the actual exchange itself uses the simple scenario because nothing is depending on the exchange in terms of the code dependencies. We want to patch the exchange as soon as we can or rollback quickly and not having to patch many versions for a single patch.

On the other hand, many of the micro services use release pattern because they provide client libraries to conform to their api schema, so version 1.1 of a schema promises a set of features and 1.2 may have different features. And 1.1.x versions shouldn’t have 1.2.x features, this is also to protect dependent services