Backend SDE

Services, stores, and scale.

Services, stores, and scale that a product-side backend engineer ships in production. JVM or Go, classical OLTP, async messaging, and the deployment surface around them.

Who this track is for

Same curriculum. Two different interview loops.

New grad: Targeting your first backend SDE role plus a summer internship that converts to a return offer. Same capstone as experienced students — the interview loop leans harder on coding fundamentals, lighter on production war stories.
Experienced: Targeting a level-jump at FAANG or a comparable unicorn. You bring real production stories; we stress-test them and rebuild the weak ones on the capstone. Onsite-heavy, behavioral matters, competing offers win the negotiation.

How the 12 months line up

Recruiting is seasonal. Your pace is yours.

US tech hiring runs hot in September–November and January–March, and is quiet the rest of the year. Your offer loop is timed to whichever window lands inside your program — we don't walk students into a dead market.

The 12-month arc is a default, not a contract. Students arriving with solid production fundamentals compress Phases 01 and 02 into weeks; students new to distributed systems take the full arc. Either way, Phase 04 starts the moment you're interview-ready — often halfway through the capstone, not after it.

Active recruiting windowQuiet — build phase

Four focus areas · 12-month default

What you build, at your pace.

Durations below describe a default arc. Students with stronger foundations move through Phases 01 and 02 faster, and Phase 04 runs in parallel with the capstone once onsites start landing.

Phase 01
~3 months
Service primitives
- Concurrency models and the memory / latency trade-offs behind them.
- OLTP storage engines, indexing, and query planning, from first principles.
- API contracts, schema evolution, and versioning that survive real migrations.
- Deployment surface: containers, orchestration, and safe rollouts.
Phase 02
~4 months
Distributed systems at production scale
- Consistency, replication, and the consensus primitives underneath them.
- Async patterns: queues, streams, exactly-once, backpressure.
- Caching architectures and invalidation discipline.
- Observability and SLO-driven on-call instincts.
Phase 03
~3 months
Capstone
- Ship a production-grade multi-service backend, end to end.
- Own the capacity plan, the failure modes, and the rollback story.
- Defend every trade-off at the level you're interviewing for.
Phase 04
Parallel once you're ready · timed to the next window
Offer loop
- System design rehearsed at the level you're targeting.
- Behavioral loop grounded in what you built on capstone.
- OA and VO drill sets until the patterns are muscle memory.
- Offer negotiation: levers, timing, and competing offers.
New grad
Hit Sep–Nov for summer internships with return-offer potential, then the Jan–Mar new-grad cycle as a second swing.
Experienced
Line onsites up inside one recruiting window (Sep–Nov or Jan–Mar) so competing offers land within days of each other.