How to Nail your next Technical Interview

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StepUp: Fast-track your interview prep

Nail Your Next Tech Interview in <2 Months

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Students enrolled: 1174

Fast-track your tech interview prep with mock interviews, mentoring sessions, and interview prep material designed by FAANG+ experts. Join our Free Webinar to learn more.

Best suited for: 5+ years of work experience

Backend Engineers!

Get interview-ready with lessons from FAANG+ engineers

Master core Back-end interview concepts

Sharpen your coding and system design interview skills

Backend Engineering Program

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12th June, 2022

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Duration

4 months (apx. 10 hours/week)

Students who chose to uplevel with IK got placed at

Pratik Agarwal

Software Development Engineer ll

Suat Mercan

Senior Software Engineer

Anshul Bansal

Software Engineer

Kishore Periassamy

Software Development Engineer

Harisha Chemuru

Software Engineer

Vinayak Prabhu

System Development Engineer

Kelsi Lakey

Software Engineer

Shrey Shrivastava

Software Development Engineer ll

Akshay Chandrachood

Software Engineer

Aniruddha Tekade

Senior Software Engineer

With the StepUp program, you get:

Expert-designed interview prep material and videos to help you prepare at your own accelerated pace

10 one-on-one mentoring sessions/mock interviews with instructors who are tech leads, hiring managers, and recruiters from Tier-1 companies

Lifetime access to course material, session recordings, and feedback

Placement assistance: Resume and LinkedIn profile building, application strategy, performance-based referrals, and salary negotiation

Unlimited technical and behavioral live coaching sessions

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Best suited for

SWEs, EMs, PMs, TPMs who are currently interviewing or plan to start interviewing soon (with <2 months to prepare)

SWEs, EMs, PMs, TPMs who’ve been impacted by the recent layoffs (including professionals on H1B visas)

Why choose this course?

Designed by FAANG+ experts

Covers data structures & algorithms, systems design and all core tech domains

Mock interviews with Silicon Valley engineers

Live interview practice in real-life simulated environments with FAANG and top-tier interviewers

1:1 mentoring sessions

Technical and career coaching sessions with FAANG and Tier-1 tech professionals

Personalized feedback

Constructive, structured, and actionable insights for improved interview performance

6-month support period

Resume building, LinkedIn profile optimization, and personal branding

Personalized feedback

Constructive, structured, and actionable insights for improved interview performance

Career skills development

Resume building, LinkedIn profile optimization, personal branding, and live behavioral workshops

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A typical week at Interview Kickstart

This is how we make your interview prep structured and organized. Our learners spend 10-12 hours each week on this course.

Thu

Foundational content

Get high-quality videos and course material for next week’s topics

Covers fundamentals, interview-relevant topics, and case studies

Assignment review sessions

1-hour timed test/assignment covering essential interview questions on the current week's topics

Attend 1-hour review sessions that provide solutions and feedback on the current week's test/assignment

Sun

Online live sessions

Attend 4-hour sessions covering interview-relevant Back-end concepts

A FAANG+ instructor will lead a discussion on a wide range of interview problems, open-ended design questions, and how to approach them

Mon-Wed

Practice problems & case studies

Apply the concepts taught in live sessions to solve assignment questions

In class, discuss case studies' solutions and practice answering framework

Live doubt-solving with FAANG+ Back-end instructors

Every day

1:1 access to instructors

Personalized coaching from FAANG+ Back-end instructors

Individualized and detailed attention to your questions

Solution walkthroughs

Contact for Pricing

Course Curriculum

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Practice and track progress on UpLevel

UpLevel will be your all-in-one learning platform to get you FAANG-ready, with 10,000+ interview questions, timed tests, videos, mock interviews suite, and more.

Mock interviews suite

On-demand timed tests

In-browser online judge

10,000 interview questions

100,000 hours of video explanations

Class schedules & activity alerts

Real-time progress update

11 programming languages

What makes our mock interviews the best:

What makes our mock Interviews the best:

Hiring managers from Tier-1 companies like Google & Apple

Interview with the best. No one will prepare you better!

Domain-specific Interviews

Practice for your target domain

Detailed personalized feedback

Identify and work on your improvement areas

Transparent, non-anonymous interviews

Get the most realistic experience possible

Meet your mentors

Our highly experienced mentors are active hiring managers and employees at FAANG+ companies and know exactly what it takes to ace tech and managerial interviews.

Omkar Deshpande

Head of Curriculum

15+ years experience

Nick Camilleri

Head of Career Skills Dev & Coaching

10+ years experience

William Repking

Software Engineer

15+ years experience

FAANG Company

Patrick Korianski

Software Engineer

6+ years experience

FAANG Company

Jonathan Carothers

Senior Software Engineer

15+ years experience

FAANG Company

Career impact

Our engineers land high-paying and rewarding offers from the biggest tech companies, including Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, and Netflix.

Suat Mercan

Senior Software Engineer

Placed at:

IK’s back-end engineering program helped me learn helpful nuances in programming and understandthe fundamentals of system design. The instructors from FAANG companies were inspiring. The mock interviews are also very helpful to get exposed to interviewing experience.

Chun Wu

Senior Software Engineer

Placed at:

I joined iK after stumbling across it while reviewing some other interview prep materials after doing poorly in an interview at Linkedin. I knew that doing well in these interviews would require dedication and investment of my time - but with so many resources online I didn't have structure. This is what the IK platform provided me.

Shrey Shrivastava

Software development Engineer ll

Placed at:

The Interview Kickstart course is very structured and informative. They teach you about DS and algo fundamentals very thoroughly and also prepare you for the software engineering interview. I really like the live classes by FAANG engineers, and the homework and tests definitely help you toprepare for a real interview. If you have been looking for a bootcamp that prepares you for software engineering interviews, I would say this is definitely the right place to do it.

Sridhar Gandham

Senior Software Engineer

Placed at:

My experience at IK was extremely positive. I was preparing for FAANG companies using the standard techniques that you find on the internet. When I started preparing, there was no structure to the madness. For example, a simple quicksort can be implemented in multiple ways. So solving a medium problem would take me about 30 minutes. The biggest benefit that I got from IK was a clear, structured way of solving problems. After IK, I could solve medium problems in 10 minutes!

Ibrahim Demidrogen

Software Engineer

Placed at:

IK is super helpful in cementing a lot of the basics and developing a deeper understanding of the core concepts that are essential to the interview process at any FAANG company. The foundation material is dense, but it is discussed at a swift pace. Omkar's instructional videos are very detailed and break down the essentials into small digestible components. The mock interview sessions are super helpful, especially for those who need additional guidance and help with defining their shortcomings.

Akriti Bhatt

Software Engineer

Placed at:

Interview Kickstart is a great platform to perfect your basics and get a deep understanding of algorithms. These sessions helped me crack Google and several other companies.

Having struggled for a while to understand what I was doing wrong in interviews and how to behave during an interview, I took the help of 1-1 interview sessions with the mentors and the guidance provided by them helped me understand the problem with my approach.

How to enroll?

Join our Free Webinar hosted by Ryan Valles, co-founder of Interview Kickstart, to understand the enrollment process and get answers to all your questions about tech interviews.

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What to Expect at Back-End Engineering Interviews

Generally, the interview process for back-end engineers is divided into the following segments:

Recruiter screening

The hiring recruiter will contact you by phone to discuss his or her work experience. The recruiter will determine which roles you are qualified for based on your work experience. Knowing which projects and experiences you want to talk about before going into the interview can be helpful.

After going through this round, you should receive a follow-up email from the recruiter that will include an online technical assessment.

Online assessment

This interview is an online screening of your programming skills. You will have about 90 minutes to complete three coding challenges similar to Leetcode. In each challenge, you will be tested on data structures and algorithms. It is important that you write compiling code and pass the majority of the test cases shown in the UI.

To prepare for this round, you should:

Be thorough with data structures and algorithms in a particular language (IE python, java, etc.)
Revise space and time complexities
Practice problems online on websites like Leetcode

Final interview stage

This round consists of 4-6 interviews of one-hour each. These rounds are as follows:

2- 3 technical programming interviews
1-2 system design interview
One behavioral interview

Technical Programming Interviews

These interviews will each consist of one programming challenge, where you will be given a coding challenge similar to the ones in the online assessment, but this time with an actual SDE.

The challenges will test your knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and OOP. During the problem-solving stage, you will be asked about test cases, time/space complexity, and ways to improve the solution.

Using an online coding practice website like Leetcode to prepare for the back-end engineer interview questions on tech programming can be extremely beneficial. While practicing, make sure to include questions about algorithms, data structures, and object-oriented programming.

System Design Interview

This section will be with a Hiring Manager or principal engineer who will test your system design skills. An example of a system design question could be “Design Instagram,” in which you should:

Dive into the requirements and assumptions
Layout the architecture
Define some databases
Define some APIs
Define performance-related parts of your design

This section is about designing the software rather than coding it. However, depending on the problem, you may have to pseudo-code at times.

To prepare for the back-end engineer interview questions on system design, you should practice software design. You should understand servers, caching, performance-related topics, databases, APIs, etc.

Behavioral Interview

A "Bar Raiser" conducts this back-end engineer interview on behavioral skills, which is primarily about the experience and how one can relate to specific behavioral topics and scenarios. In an Amazon interview, for example, you will be asked behavioral questions about their leadership principles, and the interviewer will assess whether or not your answers align with the company's values.

You should prepare for this section by understanding Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles and how your experience relates to them. Also, when you are explaining your solution, try to use the STAR (situation, task, action, and result) method to break down your answer.

Final decision

After the final round of back-end engineer interview questions, you should hear back within two weeks. During the interview, your technical skills and behavioral responses will be compared to the technical competencies of the role, as well as the principles of the company, to see if you’re a good fit.

To clear the tough interviews at the top tech companies globally, you’ll need to have the right skills. Read 7 Back-end Developer Skills You Must Have to Crack Tech Interviews and start getting ready!

Back-End Engineering Interview Questions

Back-end developer interview questions for beginners evaluate the basic understanding of different programming languages. The difficulty level of questions keeps increasing as per your experience level. Advanced back-end engineering interview questions are focused on the framework of back-end development, technologies, languages, etc.

The back-end engineer developer questions can be classified into three buckets:

Back-End Engineering Interview Questions on Coding

Given the root node of a binary tree, clone it (clone every node of the tree) and return the root node of the cloned tree.

Given a binary tree and an integer k, find all the root to leaf paths that sum to k.

Given a set of integers and a target value k, find whether there is a non-empty subset that sums up to k.

Count the number of inversions in a given array of numbers. A pair (nums[i], nums[j]) is said to form an inversion if nums[i] > nums[j] and i < j.

Given a sorted dictionary of an alien language, find the order of characters in the alphabet.‍

For some of the most popular coding questions for software engineers, go over Top Coding Interview Questions for Software Engineers.

Domain-specific Back-End Engineering Interview Questions

How will you implement indexing for all the payments for an e-commerce application?

Design an API for a weather application using REST and non-REST architecture styles

How to test an API for security threats? Understanding the threats and then working on steps to prevent security threats: XSS, CSRF, SQL injection, input sanitization.

Build a mathematical library for a computer algebra system like Mathematica

What properties govern transaction reliability? What are the characteristics of data inconsistency? What is transaction isolation, and how would you use it for concurrency control?‍

Back-End Engineering Interview Questions on Behavioral Skills

Tell us about a time when you received criticism about your work and how you handled it.

If you have to deliver negative feedback to members of your development team, how would you do it?

Tell me about your favorite development project to date and what it was like from start to finish.

Describe a conflict you had with your manager or team member.

How would you handle dependencies in cross-functional teams?‍

Back-End Engineering Career

Deciding to be a back-end engineer can be an exciting and rewarding career choice. However, before that, you’ll need to first learn all there is to know about the role and then start preparing for the back-end engineer interview.

Back-End Engineering Job Roles and Responsibilities

Back-end developers build programs and establish workflows that are focused on how a web application works. Then, they lay the code that powers web applications with functionality and logic. Back-end programming requires a tech stack consisting of servers, libraries, applications, and databases.

Even though the specific responsibilities of back end developers may vary from company to company, their key responsibilities include:

Working on server-side logic and outward-facing web application elements

Optimizing the applications for maximum speed and scalability

Designing data storage solution

Developing content management system and maintaining the same

Troubleshooting and debugging applications

Creating reusable code and libraries for future use

Write code and tests, build prototypes, solve issues, profile and analyze bottlenecks

Design robust APIs that support mobile and desktop clients

To understand the different roles of a back-end developer better, here’s how the responsibilities change as you move up the ladder:

Junior Backend developer

Has approximately 1-2 years experience and basic programming foundations. The roles and responsibilities of an entry-level back-end engineer involve:

Collaborating with other developers to plan and build features for current products.

Contributing to the design and architecture of the application servers, Enhance analytics and overall backend architecture for better performance.

Write high-quality, structured application/interface code, and documentation and take part in code review procedures to find security vulnerabilities or poor code quality issues before new code is made available to the public

Create and consume RESTful APIs.

Design, develop, and maintain internal and external applications. Build efficient, testable, and reusable modules.

Identify solutions through research and collaboration that resolves the root of problems as they arise.

Senior Backend developer

Has approximately 2-8 years of experience and is responsible for server-side web application logic and integration of the work front-end developers do. The roles and responsibilities of a senior-level back-end engineer involve:

Developing new features and functionality for various pages in an application

Continuously improving, refactoring, and modernizing the existing codebase

Monitoring quality, optimizing performance, and developing test coverage and methodologies for continuous code release

Understand architectural patterns of large, high-scale web applications, such as well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, and design efficient algorithms.

Work with the product managers, the technical leads, the experience designers, and other software developers to do research, and implement various workflows.

Implement the cloud and microservices stack, connecting cloud platforms and tools to partner and customer ecosystems

Design, prototype, implement, test, and troubleshoot backend workflows according to market requirements and product specifications

Lead Backend Developer

Has an experience of 8+ years of experience and acts as a technology professional who guides projects and manages development teams. They've often experienced experts with lots of industry knowledge and skills that qualify them to mentor teams and communicate with others outside their department. The roles and responsibilities of a senior-level back-end engineer involve:

Participate in the design, implementation, and testing of distributed systems in an agile environment. Decompose high-level and complex requirements into task-level work for themselves and others on the team.

Ability to understand and build complex systems to solve challenging analytical problems, complete research activities for new features and enhancements, and contribute to design and code reviews

Engage in engineering culture to consistently deliver value to our customers and business

Lead, coach, mentor, and work with other developers to design and implement secure, scalable, highly available services using our core web technologies.

Make recommendations for the development and implementation of complex projects that require comprehensive and in-depth analysis and understanding of the client’s requirements.

Design and Develop Highly Scalable, Available microservices using Microservices Architecture.

Build APIs and services that support both mobile apps offered by CVSHealth and are used internally.

Migrate on-prem web applications and backend services to the cloud.

Drive best practice, quality, and consistency within design and development phases

Contributing to team meetings, troubleshooting development and production problems across multiple environments and operating platforms

Staff Backend developer

Has an experience over a range of 10-15+ years and works on the technical team at an organization, to decode, design, develop, and maintain company backend systems and servers to ensure an efficient user experience.

Plays a leadership role in maintaining and improving the web stack, data architecture, build, deploy & test, software lifecycle, and platform scalability

Leading the development of internal and administrative tools required for products to scale

Be the technical leader for the team of engineers building best-in-class software

As a self-motivated and enthusiastic member of the team, collaborate with extremely smart and proficient peers leading and designing solutions with a strong background in distributed systems, and large-scale database systems.

Work in an agile environment with a focus on problem-solving and engineering perfection. As a technical lead, A staff backend developer is expected to assess business problems, design optimal solutions, and drive implementation to meet the business expectations.

Collaborate closely with peers, Architects, Product Managers, Business Analysts, Quality Engineers, and Operations teams to develop innovative solutions that meet functional and non-functional standards and expectations.

As a staff backend engineer, you will guide junior and senior engineers in your team and also across domain teams in building scalable, high-speed, distributed applications and advocate for meeting the design and quality standards.

For a more detailed description of these roles and responsibilities, read What Is the Career Path for Back-end Engineers? Learn more about the different roles and how to prepare for back-end engineer interviews.

Back-End Engineer Levels at FAANG

More responsibilities are added to your job description as you gain experience and knowledge. Companies use levels to represent this ascension. Companies essentially determine job levels to classify tasks such as compensation structure, leadership, and accountability.

The software engineer levels at FAANG companies are

Facebook: E3 (entry-level) → E4 → E5 → E6 → E7 → E8 (equivalent to Director; D1)
Apple: ICT 2 (entry-level) → ICT 3 → ICT 4 → ICT 5 → ICT 6 (highest level for a software engineer)
Amazon: L4 (SDE I) → L5 (SDE II) → L6 (SDE III) → L7 (Principal SDE) → L8 (Senior Principal SDE) → L10 (Distinguished Engineer)
Netflix: Unlike other FAANG companies, there is only one level on the ladder of progression for software engineers. The company strictly hires only experienced employees; thus, the Netflix senior software engineer position is the only level.
Google: L3 → L4 → L5 → L6 → L7 (Senior Staff Software Engineer) → L8 (Principal Software Engineer) → L9 (Distinguished Software Engineer) → L10 (Google Fellow) → L11 (Google Senior Fellow)

Facebook Back-End Engineer Salary

The average annual Facebook software engineer salary, ranked by level, is given below:

Back-End Engineer at Facebook

Average compensation by level

Level name

Total

Base

Stock (/yr)

Bonus

$184K

$122K

$42K

$21K

$265K

$162K

$83K

$22K

$386K

$196K

$156K

$35K

$574K

$229K

$297K

$50K

$914K

$270K

$574K

$77K

$1.49M

$304K

$1.10M

$88K

Amazon Back-End Engineer Salary

The annual Amazon software engineer salary at different levels has been given below:

Back-End Engineer at Amazon

Average compensation by level

Level name

Total

Base

Stock (/yr)

Bonus

SDE I

$166K

$126K

$22K

$20K

SDE II

$232K

$154K

$65K

$19K

SDE III

$336K

$169K

$157K

$18K

Principal SDE

$592K

$180K

$392K

$31K

Senior Principal SDE

$820K

$195K

$625K

Apple Back-End Engineer Salary

Based on the different levels of hierarchy in the company, the average annual Apple software engineer salary has been given below:

Back-End Engineer at Apple

Average compensation by level

Level name

Total

Base

Stock (/yr)

Bonus

ICT2

$163K

$125K

$26K

$16K

ICT3

$216K

$147K

$55K

$18K

ICT4

$315K

$184K

$106K

$26K

ICT5

$447K

$216K

$194K

$39K

ICT6

$738K

$269K

$409K

$61K

Netflix Back-End Engineer Salary

As we’ve mentioned above, Netflix doesn’t have different levels for software engineers. The company only hires senior software engineers, and the average salary of a Netflix software engineer is estimated to be $511K (excluding bonus).

However, this value varies as per the office location, the seniority of the employee, and years of experience. An overview of total compensation received by Netflix software engineers:

Back-End Engineer at Netflix

Average compensation by level

Level name

Total

Base

Stock (/yr)

Bonus

Sr. SW. Engineer

$305K

$275K

$14K

$13K

Google Back-End Engineer Salary

The average Google software engineer salary at different levels has been given below:

Back-End Engineer at Google

Average compensation by level

Level name

Total

Base

Stock (/yr)

Bonus

$190K

$131K

$39K

$21K

$267K

$159K

$81K

$29K

$357K

$188K

$133K

$37K

$493K

$225K

$218K

$57K

$695K

$265K

$348K

$85K

$1.04M

$332K

$605K

$120K

You can learn more about more related topics on our companies page.

How to Nail your next Technical Interview

Nail Your Next Tech Interview in <2 Months

Next webinar starts in

Students who chose to uplevel with IK got placed at

With the StepUp program, you get:

Best suited for

Next webinar starts in

Why choose this course?

Designed by FAANG+ experts

Mock interviews with Silicon Valley engineers

1:1 mentoring sessions

Personalized feedback

6-month support period

Personalized feedback

Career skills development

Next webinar starts in

A typical week at Interview Kickstart

Thu

Sun

Mon-Wed

Every day

Course Curriculum

Sorting

Recursion

Trees

Graphs

Dynamic Programming

Online Processing Systems

Batch Processing Systems

Stream Processing Systems

Choose from:

15 mock interviews

Take classes you missed/retake classes/tests

Self-paced content on additional topics for Data Structures and Algorithms‍

1:1 technical/career coaching

Interview strategy and salary negotiation support

Next webinar starts in

Practice and track progress on UpLevel

What makes our mock interviews the best:

Hiring managers from Tier-1 companies like Google & Apple

Domain-specific Interviews

Detailed personalized feedback

Transparent, non-anonymous interviews

Meet your mentors

Omkar Deshpande

Nick Camilleri

William Repking

Patrick Korianski

Jonathan Carothers

Career impact

Suat Mercan

Chun Wu

Shrey Shrivastava

Sridhar Gandham

Ibrahim Demidrogen

Akriti Bhatt

How to enroll?

Next webinar starts in

What to Expect at Back-End Engineering Interviews

Back-End Engineering Interview Questions

Back-End Engineering Career

Back-End Engineer Levels at FAANG

Back-End Engineer Interview Course FAQs

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