Senior Backend Engineer Interview Questions

2,786 senior backend engineer interview questions shared by candidates

Different ways to implement and manage threads in Java? Pros and cons of each approach. Why a thread pool size shouldn't be too large or too small? Different way of distributing/batching work across threads. Scaling with queues and databases. How would you implement a distributed rate limiter? (Hint: learn the rate-limiting algorithms). Pros and cons for every question asked.
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Senior Backend Engineer

Interviewed at Monzo Bank

3.9
Feb 12, 2026

Different ways to implement and manage threads in Java? Pros and cons of each approach. Why a thread pool size shouldn't be too large or too small? Different way of distributing/batching work across threads. Scaling with queues and databases. How would you implement a distributed rate limiter? (Hint: learn the rate-limiting algorithms). Pros and cons for every question asked.

There are different sort of questions depending on the interview step you're in. For example, on the interview with a Team Lead you might be asked what makes a great engineer and on the debrief session you'll discuss the solution to the given task and the questions may be about typical distributed systems problems.
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Senior Ruby Backend Developer

Interviewed at Qonto

4.3
Mar 10, 2023

There are different sort of questions depending on the interview step you're in. For example, on the interview with a Team Lead you might be asked what makes a great engineer and on the debrief session you'll discuss the solution to the given task and the questions may be about typical distributed systems problems.

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