What Kubernetes interviewers actually ask once you’re past pods
8 min read The pod and service definitions get you through the phone screen; the failure scenarios decide the onsite. Read article
System Design
System Design
How the TLS handshake works, and what interviewers probe
7 min read A walkthrough of the TLS 1.3 handshake, forward secrecy, certificate validation, 0-RTT replay risk, and the post-quantum key exchange interviewers started asking about in 2026. Read article
System Design
Why interviewers keep asking if you can revoke a JWT
7 min read A senior-level walk through the OAuth, OIDC, and JWT questions that come up in backend and security interviews, and the answers that actually land. Read article
System Design
Designing a matching engine that keeps price-time priority
7 min read How exchanges match buy and sell orders, why the hot path runs on a single thread, and how the book rebuilds itself after a crash. Read article
Interview Prep
What Clay’s engineering interview actually tests
7 min read Clay runs a long, practical engineering loop built around its own product problems; here is the round structure, the questions, and how to prepare. Read article
Interview Prep
How Mercor interviews engineers with its own AI
6 min read A breakdown of Mercor’s four-round engineering loop, from the AI interviewer that reads your resume to the vibe-coding session on the super day. Read article
Interview Prep
What the Baseten engineering interview actually tests
6 min read Baseten’s engineering loop leans on inference-serving depth, so the coding stays practical while the system design round asks how you’d keep a GPU fleet fast and cheap under load. Read article
System Design
When to partition, when to shard, and when to just replicate
7 min read The difference between partitioning, sharding, and replication that interviewers keep probing, and how to reason about which one a system actually needs. Read article
System Design
How NoSQL data modeling questions test query-first thinking
6 min read A walkthrough of the DynamoDB, Cassandra, and MongoDB modeling questions that show up in system design rounds, and how to reason through them. Read article
AI/ML Interview Questions
How to design a recommendation system in an ML interview
7 min read What interviewers probe when they ask you to design a feed: scoping the objective, the retrieval and ranking funnel, two-tower models, cold start, and how you would evaluate it. Read article
System Design
HTTP methods and status codes that trip up backend interviews
7 min read A working reference for HTTP methods and status codes, with the safe-versus-idempotent distinction and the codes interviewers keep probing. Read article
System Design
Counting a billion ad clicks a day without double-counting
8 min read How to design an ad click aggregator that stays fresh for advertiser dashboards and exact for billing, covering dedup, hot keys, and late events. Read article
System Design
What interviewers want when they say design a rate limiter
7 min read A walkthrough of the rate limiter system design question, from scoping the limit to the distributed counter problem that trips most candidates up. Read article
System Design
Design a message queue without hand-waving the hard parts
7 min read A walkthrough of the delivery, ordering, and durability decisions a message-queue design round actually grades. Read article
System Design
Designing search autocomplete that keeps up with your typing
8 min read How typeahead suggestions get served from memory inside a per-keystroke latency budget, and the ranking, indexing, and sharding calls interviewers actually probe. Read article
