Roundiva
Sample roadmap: senior backend interview in 14 days
This is a public sample plan—not your personalized Roundiva sprint. It shows how a focused senior backend loop might allocate two weeks across coding depth, system design, production topics and behavioural evidence. Use it to understand Roundiva’s style, then start a free diagnostic for a plan matched to your company and timeline.
Who this sample is for
Engineers targeting senior/staff-leaning backend roles with roughly two weeks until onsite or final rounds. Adjust intensity if you have less time; Roundiva’s product plans compress or expand based on your interview date.
Days 1–3 — Diagnose and coding foundations
Clarify the company stack and likely rounds, then rebuild fluency on high-leverage coding patterns under time pressure.
- Day 1: Map JD themes (APIs, data, reliability). Write three stories that prove ownership and technical judgment.
- Day 2: Arrays/hashes/graphs warm-up — two timed problems with spoken explanation out loud.
- Day 3: Concurrency and correctness — one harder problem plus a short postmortem of mistakes.
Days 4–7 — Backend depth
Shift into topics interviewers use to probe production experience.
- Day 4: Data modeling and indexing trade-offs for a familiar product surface.
- Day 5: Caching strategies, invalidation, and stampede/hot-key failure modes.
- Day 6: Messaging, retries, idempotency and exactly-once myths.
- Day 7: Observability — SLIs, tracing, on-call style debugging narrative.
Days 8–11 — System design
Practice full design interviews with clarifying questions, capacity estimates and explicit trade-offs.
- Day 8: Design a rate limiter or distributed cache — requirements first.
- Day 9: Design a notification or feed system — fan-out and consistency choices.
- Day 10: Multi-region and failure scenarios — what breaks and how you degrade.
- Day 11: Mock design with a timer; write a scorecard of missed criteria.
Days 12–14 — Integration and readiness
Combine coding + design + behavioural into interview-day readiness.
- Day 12: Mixed mock (coding + short design prompt).
- Day 13: Behavioural deep dive — conflict, ambiguity, mentoring, incident leadership.
- Day 14: Light revision only — top five weak areas and company-specific questions to ask.
What Roundiva personalizes beyond this sample
Your real plan should change with the JD, remaining days, demonstrated mastery and which rounds are confirmed. Roundiva’s diagnostic builds that plan from your context instead of a fixed template.