Backend Developer Interview Questions
10 questions with tips and sample answers for remote job interviews in 2026.
1 technical How do you design a REST API that will need to support backwards compatibility as it evolves?
What to include: Versioning strategy (/v1/ prefix or Accept header), deprecation policy, never breaking existing fields, additive-only changes in minor versions.
Practice this question with AI feedback →2 technical Explain the trade-offs between SQL and NoSQL databases. How do you choose?
What to include: SQL: strong consistency, relations, mature tooling. NoSQL: flexible schema, horizontal scale. Choose based on data model and query patterns, not trends.
Practice this question with AI feedback →3 behavioral Tell me about a scalability challenge you solved.
What to include: Give concrete numbers (requests/sec, payload size). Explain the bottleneck you found, the solution (cache, queue, index, sharding), and the measured result.
Practice this question with AI feedback →4 technical How do you handle distributed transactions when a single operation spans multiple services?
What to include: Saga pattern (choreography vs orchestration), two-phase commit trade-offs, idempotency keys, and compensating transactions.
Practice this question with AI feedback →5 remote How do you document internal APIs for a team spread across time zones?
What to include: OpenAPI spec generated from code, a developer portal, changelog for breaking changes, and code examples — not just field definitions.
Practice this question with AI feedback →6 technical What is your approach to writing secure code? Give specific examples.
What to include: OWASP top 10 as a checklist: injection (parameterized queries), auth (JWT best practices), access control (deny by default), dependency audits.
Practice this question with AI feedback →7 behavioral Describe a time you had to debug a memory leak or resource exhaustion in production.
What to include: Show profiling discipline: heap dump or memory profiler, isolating the leak to a code path, testing the fix under load.
Practice this question with AI feedback →8 situational You need to migrate a high-traffic table with zero downtime. How do you approach it?
What to include: Shadow table, dual-write, backfill, traffic cut-over, then cleanup. Or use online schema change tools (pt-online-schema-change, gh-ost).
Practice this question with AI feedback →9 remote How do you review pull requests effectively on a distributed team?
What to include: Review for correctness first, then style. Leave actionable comments with "blocking / non-blocking" labels. Respond within the agreed SLA.
Practice this question with AI feedback →10 technical How do you implement rate limiting in an API to protect against abuse?
What to include: Token bucket or leaky bucket algorithm, Redis-backed counters, per-user vs per-IP vs per-endpoint limits. Return 429 with Retry-After header.
Practice this question with AI feedback →Practice answering with AI scoring
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