Back-End Developer Interview Questions — NxtWave

Share a brief introduction about yourself, your background, and your relevant experience.

Explain the application you are currently working on, the specific problem it addresses, and the target users it serves.

Discuss how you integrate Jira into your team's daily development workflow.

State the problem (Given an array of integers nums and an integer target, return indices of the two numbers such that they add up to target.) and discuss possible approaches at a high level. No solution code.

Explain the complete end-to-end lifecycle of a request and response in a Django application.

Define and contrast the concepts of authentication and authorization specifically within the context of Django.

Explain what token-based authentication is in Django and describe its appropriate use cases.

Describe lazy loading in the context of databases or Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs). Explain situations where it is beneficial and where it can be detrimental.

Explain how to model a many-to-many relationship between tables using Django's ORM.

Describe strategies for executing heavy or long-running operations within a Django application to avoid blocking the main thread or requests.

Explain what Celery is and discuss its common use cases when integrated with a Django application.

Explain the internal workings of Django ORM joins and demonstrate how to write them in a clean and efficient manner.

Explain the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) in the context of database transactions.

Define atomicity and explain its significance in transactional database systems.

Explain what indexing is in a database and provide guidelines on when it is appropriate to add an index.

Provide a high-level explanation of how database indexing works internally.

Compare and contrast database indexing with the GROUP BY clause, highlighting their differences in purpose and how they affect query execution plans.

Design a table diagram for a minimal e-commerce application. Identify the core entities, their primary/foreign keys, and the relationships between them.

Building on the minimal e-commerce design, identify and specify the types of relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many) that exist between the entities, indicating where each relationship applies.

Explain the complete end-to-end deployment process for a production web application. Detail the necessary machines and services, including considerations for EC2, S3, databases, load balancers, networking, and observability tools.

Discuss strategies to improve API latency for a real service operating under heavy load, considering optimizations across the entire stack: network, application code, database, caching mechanisms, and deployment strategies.

Explain how you integrate Jira into your development and release pipeline, referencing issue states, branching strategies, pull request (PR) reviews, and release notes.

Identify optimal locations to implement caching within a Django or FastAPI service and specify the types of data or responses that would be suitable for caching.

Discuss the criteria and considerations for choosing between synchronous and asynchronous execution paths when designing a web API.

Describe the key metrics and logs you would monitor to ensure compliance with latency and error budgets in a production system.