How to prepare for interviews as Senior Software Engineer

At this point, preparing for a job is much easier than it used to be, you can just use AI to help you. What I usually do before an interview is spend time on a few key things.

1. Core language, if you’re coding in something like Golang, you should refresh topics you haven’t touched in a while or maybe forgot.
2. Practice coding, could be LeetCode or anything else, it doesn’t really matter, you just need to solve problems to get back into shape for coding interviews. (Personally I hate LeetCode-style interviews, I prefer more real-world tasks like building an API or something practical.)
3. System design, it’s a broad area, but if you’re a solid engineer you already know a lot. Still, reading up on distributed systems and similar topics helps.
4. Databases, I don’t spend too much time here, but it’s worth refreshing things like ACID, transaction levels, indexes, and when to use different types of databases. SQL-wise, if you’re a backend dev, you probably don’t need much extra.
5. Distributed systems, architectures, caching, CAP theorem, common patterns like 2-phase commit or SAGA, eventual vs strong consistency.
6. Security fundamentals, auth, JWT, OAuth2, secrets management, different types of attacks and how to prevent them.
7. Observability, logging, metrics, all that.
8. K8s, depends on the role, but sometimes it’s a nice plus if you understand how it works.
9. Golang-specific stuff, data races, concurrency patterns, mutexes, sync package, etc.
10. Behavioral, you should prepare a list of things you worked on in the past, what you actually built yourself, not just your team, main challenges you faced, how you handled them, and situations where you had conflicts at work and how you resolved them.
11. Before going into an interview, research the company and ask AI to interview you. You’ll realize you know quite a lot, but also clearly see your weak spots.

This isn’t a full list, but if you spend a few days going through this before an interview, your chances are definitely better. Every interview is different, you never know what you’ll get, but there’s a good rule, in a critical situation, you fall back to your level of preparation. So just prepare well.

And do some interviews. Good luck.