Playbook
Practise the interview style you’re actually facing
Every company interviews a little differently. Each Playbook style weights the topics the way that kind of technical screen really runs — backend depth, frontend rendering, distributed systems, security, and more — on the same adaptive interviewer that corrects you like a senior engineer.
Start practising freeBackend deep-dive
The classic senior-backend screen: design an API, model the data behind it, and defend the choices when the load goes up. Expect to be pushed on where the bottleneck really is, not just whether the endpoint returns 200.
- APIs
- Databases
- Caching
- Scaling
Full-stack product
A product-engineer screen that moves across the stack: a React UI, the types that hold it together, the API and data behind it, and the tests that keep it honest. Breadth with enough depth that hand-waving any one layer shows.
- React
- TypeScript
- APIs
- Testing
Frontend depth
A frontend specialist screen that goes past framework trivia into the JavaScript and types underneath: rendering behaviour, the runtime model, and the type system you lean on when the UI gets complicated.
- React
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Rendering
Distributed & real-time
The screen for systems that never sit still: streams, queues, and connections that have to survive a node dying. Expect to be asked what happens to an in-flight message when things go wrong — and to have a real answer.
- Streaming
- Queues
- Consistency
- Scaling
Architecture & trade-offs
A broad, senior-to-staff loop that lives in the grey areas: no single right answer, just choices and the reasons behind them. You'll move across data, APIs, and real-time, and the interview is really about your judgment under ambiguity.
- System design
- Data
- APIs
- Trade-offs
Security-focused
A screen for teams that treat security as a first-class concern: auth done right, the OWASP failure modes, and the instinct to threat-model before you build. Cargo-culted answers get found out fast here.
- AuthN / AuthZ
- OWASP
- Crypto
- APIs
AI engineering
The screen AI-native teams actually run: not model math, but the engineering around LLMs — structured output, retrieval, evaluation, and the failure modes that come with non-determinism. It's about shipping and operating AI features, not training models.
- LLMs
- RAG
- Evaluation
- APIs
Platform & reliability
A platform- and SRE-adjacent screen: how software ships, runs, and stays up. CI, containers, deploys, and observability — plus the judgment to know what to measure and what to roll back. The runtime slot flexes to whatever language the platform is built in.
- CI/CD
- Containers
- Observability
- Reliability