How to Nail your next Technical Interview

1 hour

Step 1

Step 2

Congratulations!

You have registered for our webinar

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Step 1

Step 2

Confirmed

You are scheduled with Interview Kickstart.

Redirecting...

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Nick Camilleri

Head of Career Skills Development & Coaching

*Based on past data of successful IK students

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Thank you! Please check your inbox for the course details.

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Switchup: Transform Your Career

Transition to Full Stack Developer roles at Tier-1 companies

4.56

Students enrolled: 1174

Designed and taught by FAANG+ Full Stack Engineers to help you transform your career and land your dream job.

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

Learn more about the course & pricing

It's Free

Next webinar starts in

Days

Hrs

Mins

Secs

Start Learning

Get all the information about the course and pricing in our live webinar with Q&A.

Download Course Brochure

Almost full

Next Batch

12th June, 2022

Location

Live & online

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

Vinayak Prabhu

System Development Engineer

Kelsi Lakey

Software Engineer

Shrey Shrivastava

Software Development Engineer ll

Aniruddha Tekade

Senior Software Engineer

Full Stack Developer Course Curriculum

PART 1: Mastering Full Stack Development

PART 2: Interview Prep

It's Free

Try 7-Day Email Course for FREE

Next webinar starts in

Days

Hrs

Mins

Secs

Best suited for

People in different domains, who want to learn programming languages and concepts from scratch to pursue a career in Full Stack Development

Recent college graduates or final year students aiming to build a career in Full Stack Development

Why choose this course?

Program designed by FAANG+ leads

360° course designed and taught by FAANG+ experts to help you become a Full Stack Engineer

Individualized teaching and 1:1 help

Technical coaching, homework assistance, solutions discussion, and individual session

Capstone project

Exposure to real-life Full Stack projects

Interview prep modules

Dedicated interview prep classes focused on helping you get 100% interview-ready

Mock interviews with Silicon Valley Engineers

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

Career skills development

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

It's Free

Next webinar starts in

Days

Hrs

Mins

Secs

Meet your instructors

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

Quazie Kwaselow

Senior Software Engineer

15+ years experience

André Terron

Software Engineer

6+ years experience

Joseph Cuffney

Senior Software Engineer

6+ years experience

Matthew Wilde

Senior Software Engineer

5+ years experience

Alex Mitchell

Software Engineer

5+ years experience

Anthony Hartmann

Software Engineer

5+ years experience

Built for working professionals

The program schedule is designed to fit into your work and life schedule, with live classes on weekends and coaching sessions in the evenings.

Sunday

4-hour Live Classes in the morning

Thursday

2-hour session in the evening to discuss assignments and problem solutions

Once a week

1-hour technical coaching session to discuss any additional doubts

Contact for Pricing

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

Get upto 15 mock interviews with hiring managers

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 - Full stack Engineering

Detailed personalized feedback

Identify and work on your improvement areas

Transparent, non-anonymous interviews

Get the most realistic experience possible

Career impact

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

Ian Hwang

Software Engineer

Placed at:

I attended IK and I've got a lot of knowledge that helped me get into Microsoft. Their Curriculum (algorithms and data structures) is organized very well and explanations are so helpful. And mock interviews and the feedback helped me a lot. It was worth it!

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!

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.

Neetika Srivastava

Software Engineer

Placed at:

I really like how the program is structured and how it caters to different domains. It is really helpful. The patterns that they teach you at Interview Kickstart are really useful because you can apply those patterns to any new problem. Knowing those patterns, you can solve basically any question because you can relate it to problems you have already solved, which gives you confidence.

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.

How to enroll for the Full Stack Developer course?

Learn more about Interview Kickstart and the Full Stack Developer course by joining the free webinar hosted by Ryan Valles, co-founder of Interview Kickstart.

It's Free

Try 7-Day Email Course for FREE

Next webinar starts in

Days

Hrs

Mins

Secs

A Free Guide to Kickstart Your Back-End Engineering Career at FAANG+

From the interview process and career path to interview questions and salary details — learn everything you need to know about Back-End Engineering careers at top tech companies.

It's Free

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.

Back-End Engineer Interview Course FAQs

How to enroll for the Back-End Engineering Interview Course?

Learn more about Interview Kickstart and the Back-End Engineering course by joining the free webinar hosted by Ryan Valles, co-founder of Interview Kickstart.

It's Free

Try 7-Day Email Course for FREE

Next webinar starts in

Days

Hrs

Mins

Secs

Download the Back-End Engineering
Course Brochure

Get all the details about the course & pricing.

First name

Last name

Phone number

Email address

By providing your contact information you agree to our Privacy Policy

Download Brochure

Almost there...

Your work experience (in years)

Your domain/role

When do you plan to start interviewing?

Thank you!

Download PDF Now

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

How to Nail your next Technical Interview

You may be missing out on a 66.5% salary hike*

Nick Camilleri

How many years of coding experience do you have?

FREE course on 'Sorting Algorithms' by Omkar Deshpande (Stanford PhD, Head of Curriculum, IK)

Transition to Full Stack Developer roles at Tier-1 companies

Next webinar starts in

Students who chose to uplevel with IK got placed at

Full Stack Developer Course Curriculum

PART 1: Mastering Full Stack Development

Java Basics

Object Oriented Programming & Java Collection Framework

Exception Handling & File Handling in Java

Recursion and Binary Search

Linked List

Stacks and Queues

Hashtables

Developer Essentials: Shell Scripting & Git

Getting started with Backend using Spring Boot - I

Getting started with Backend using Spring Boot - II

RESTful APIs & Spring MVC - I

RESTful APIs & Spring MVC - II

Databases and RDBMS

Spring Data Access & Service Layer - I

Spring Data Access & Service Layer - II

Spring AOP & Error Handling

Spring Testing

Spring Security

Project: Spring Boot Application

HTML

CSS

Javascript - Syntax and Concepts - I

Javascript - Syntax and Concepts - II

Javascript with HTML & CSS

Project: UI for your Spring boot application

React - I

React - II

Redux

Project: Interactive UI for your Spring boot application using React & Redux

Intro to Redis and Apache Kafka

Designing & Developing Microservices based Web Application - I

Designing & Developing Microservices based Web Application - II

Deployment basics with Docker

Capstone Project - I

Capstone Project - II

PART 2: Interview Prep

Sorting Algorithms

Binary Search

Arrays: Prefix Sum, Sliding Windows

Linked List

Recursion & Backtracking

Stacks and Queues

Trees

Graphs

Greedy Algorithms

Dynamic Programming

Online Processing

Batch Processing

Stream Processing

UI System Design

Object Modelling

API Design

Database Design

Next webinar starts in

Why choose this course?

Program designed by FAANG+ leads

Individualized teaching and 1:1 help

Capstone project

Interview prep modules

Mock interviews with Silicon Valley Engineers

Career skills development

Next webinar starts in

Meet your instructors

Quazie Kwaselow

André Terron

Joseph Cuffney

Matthew Wilde

Alex Mitchell

Anthony Hartmann

Built for working professionals

Download the Back-End Engineering
Course Brochure

Thank you for signing up for
7 Days Email Course!