Backend Engineering

Backend ownership at senior levels means APIs, auth, state, and scaling—and the failures here are visible: outages, security incidents, and "it works on my machine" in production. Interviewers and peers probe whether you understand how services communicate, where state lives, and how to scale under real constraints.

These topics build a rigorous mental model of boundaries, consistency, and failure modes—so you can design and operate backends, diagnose issues under pressure, and explain trade-offs clearly. You'll signal that you own the full request path, not just the handler.