Backend Engineer

Design relational schemas, write real SQL, use transactions and indexes, and recognize when a different data model is justified.

Understand HTTP, DNS, proxies, APIs, caching, and the complete request lifecycle behind a modern web application.

Project: build and test a FastAPI CRUD service, then expose a stable contract that a React and TypeScript frontend can consume.

Defend against common web attacks and implement authentication, authorization, secrets, and identity boundaries safely.

Design unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end tests, then enforce the right checks on every pull request with GitHub Actions.

Package backend services into small, reproducible containers and understand images, networks, volumes, Compose, and production builds.

Deploy a containerized API with managed PostgreSQL, object storage, queues, secrets, observability, staging, rollback, and cost controls.

Use events, queues, workers, retries, dead-letter queues, idempotency, and webhooks without creating invisible failure modes.

Reason about caching, replication, consistency, messaging, resilience, tracing, and reliability as a system grows.

Optional interview synthesis: practice a repeatable system-design framework while the architecture concepts are fresh; this is a checkpoint, not the finish line.

Advanced: learn when orchestration is worth its operational cost and deploy, scale, and observe a service on Kubernetes.

Capstone: deliver a production-shaped, multi-tenant FastAPI backend for a provided React client with data, auth, async work, tests, CI, containers, and operations evidence.