Top 100 Backend Development Interview
Questions
1. What is backend development? How is it different from frontend?
2. What are APIs? Difference between REST API and GraphQL?
3. What is the difference between Monolithic and Microservices architecture?
4. What is middleware in backend frameworks?
5. How do you ensure scalability in backend applications?
6. What is load balancing and why is it needed?
7. What are synchronous vs asynchronous calls?
8. What is the difference between client-side rendering and server-side rendering?
9. Difference between SQL and NoSQL databases. Examples of each.
10. What is normalization and denormalization in databases?
11. What is an index in a database? Why is it used?
12. Difference between primary key, foreign key, and unique key.
13. What is a transaction in DBMS? Explain ACID properties.
14. What are stored procedures and triggers?
15. Difference between INNER JOIN, LEFT JOIN, and RIGHT JOIN.
16. What is database sharding and replication?
17. How would you design a database for a social media app?
18. What are prepared statements and why are they important?
19. What is connection pooling?
20. Difference between SQL injection and XSS attacks.
21. What are HTTP methods? Explain GET, POST, PUT, DELETE.
22. Difference between HTTP and HTTPS.
23. What is the difference between HTTP 1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3?
24. What are HTTP status codes? Examples of 200, 400, 401, 403, 404, 500.
25. What is CORS? Why is it important in backend?
26. What are WebSockets and how are they different from HTTP?
27. What is the difference between TCP and UDP?
28. What happens when you type a URL in a browser?
29. What is DNS and how does it work?
30. Difference between session-based authentication and token-based authentication.
31. What are cookies and how are they used in backend systems?
32. Explain JWT (JSON Web Token).
33. How do you implement authentication and authorization?
34. Difference between OAuth and JWT.
35. What are CSRF and how to prevent it?
36. What is rate limiting and why is it used?
37. How do you secure APIs?
38. Explain hashing and encryption with examples.
39. Difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption.
40. What is HTTPS and how does SSL/TLS work?
41. How would you design a URL shortener (like bit.ly)?
42. How would you design an e-commerce backend?
43. How do you design a messaging system like WhatsApp?
44. Explain caching and different caching strategies.
45. What is CDN? Why is it useful?
46. What is CAP theorem in distributed systems?
47. Difference between horizontal and vertical scaling.
48. How do you handle millions of requests per second?
49. Explain eventual consistency vs strong consistency.
50. What are message queues? Kafka vs RabbitMQ.
51. How do you handle background tasks in backend?
52. What is the difference between cron jobs and message queues?
53. What are microservices? Advantages and disadvantages.
54. Difference between REST and gRPC.
55. How do services communicate in microservices architecture?
56. What is service discovery in microservices?
57. What are API gateways?
58. How do you handle failures in distributed systems?
59. What are circuit breakers in microservices?
60. Explain containerization. Docker vs Virtual Machines.
61. What is Kubernetes and why is it used?
62. Difference between scaling up and scaling out.
63. What is cloud computing? Explain IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.
64. What are serverless architectures?
65. How do you monitor backend applications?
66. Difference between logging and monitoring.
67. What tools do you use for backend debugging?
68. What is profiling in backend performance analysis?
69. How do you handle memory leaks?
70. Explain garbage collection in backend languages.
71. How do you debug a slow database query?
72. Difference between vertical partitioning and horizontal partitioning in DB.
73. What are transactions in distributed systems?
74. Explain two-phase commit protocol.
75. What is deadlock in databases and how to prevent it?
76. Difference between optimistic and pessimistic locking.
77. Explain ACID vs BASE in databases.
78. What is replication lag?
79. Difference between hot backup and cold backup.
80. What is database indexing? Types of indexes.
81. What is API versioning and why is it needed?
82. What is idempotency in APIs?
83. How do you handle pagination in APIs?
84. Explain throttling in APIs.
85. Difference between SOAP and REST APIs.
86. What is HATEOAS in REST APIs?
87. How do you handle file uploads in backend?
88. How do you store and serve images efficiently?
89. What are ORMs? Pros and cons.
90. Difference between eager loading and lazy loading.
91. How do you test backend systems? Unit testing vs integration testing.
92. What is mocking in backend testing?
93. What are test doubles?
94. Difference between black-box and white-box testing.
95. How do you handle CI/CD for backend applications?
96. What is blue-green deployment?
97. What is canary deployment?
98. How do you roll back in case of failed deployment?
99. Explain feature toggles in backend systems.
100. If you were to design a backend for a payment system, how would you ensure security and
consistency?
