Engineering Roles and Skills Questions

Comprehensive overview of common software engineering role families, the responsibilities associated with each, and the skills and experience typically expected at different seniority levels. Includes backend engineering, frontend engineering, full stack engineering, mobile engineering, platform and development operations engineering, site reliability engineering, data engineering, machine learning engineering, and solutions engineering. For each role explain core responsibilities and typical deliverables, the technical skill categories that matter such as programming languages, frameworks, databases and data systems, messaging and integration patterns, application programming interfaces, cloud platforms, containerization and infrastructure as code, observability and monitoring, and deployment pipelines. Describe typical backgrounds and hiring signals, how expectations and influence evolve from junior through mid level, senior, staff and principal levels, and the shift from task execution to system design, ownership and cross team leadership. Discuss how role definitions and hiring criteria change with company size, product domain, and organizational model, and how different engineering roles collaborate across the product lifecycle. Provide practical guidance for translating job descriptions into candidate qualifications and for assessing technical and behavioral indicators through code exercises, system design discussions, production incident reviews, metrics driven outcomes, and examples of mentorship and leadership. Conclude with role specific interview focus areas and preparation strategies for candidates targeting each family.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

List and briefly describe the core responsibilities and a couple of typical deliverables for each of these three software engineering role families: backend engineering, frontend engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE). For each role, also name 2–3 technical skills or tools you would expect an entry-level hire (0–2 years) to be familiar with and explain why those skills matter in practice.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Sketch a 2-year development plan for a junior engineer (0–1 year) to progress to a stable mid-level role. Include learning milestones, sample projects or ownership opportunities, recommended mentorship activities, and measurable success criteria at 6, 12, and 24 months.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

A candidate states on their resume: 'Improved reliability by 30%.' In an interview, what evidence and follow-up questions would you ask to validate this claim? Design a short rubric that helps an interviewer judge whether the evidence is credible, relevant, and attributable to the candidate.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

For backend engineering, describe the typical responsibilities, common deliverables (examples: API endpoints, database schemas, batch jobs), and a short list of technical skills and systems interviewers should probe (languages, frameworks, DB types, testing). Include an example microservice deliverable and 3 concrete success metrics you would use to evaluate it in production.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design an interview assignment that evaluates a candidate's ability to design a production-grade deployment pipeline supporting blue-green and canary releases, automatic rollbacks, and infrastructure-as-code. Include the deliverables you expect for a take-home assignment, and a rubric to score design, CI/CD scripts, rollback strategy, and documentation.

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