SSE Reading Notes

Curated reading guide for Senior Backend / DevOps engineer interviews. 35+ topics, three depth levels per topic.

Start with PostgreSQL System Design framework DSA patterns

What this is

A focused reading guide for engineers preparing for Senior Software Engineer (backend / DevOps) interviews. Not a textbook — opinionated cheat-sheets that trade exhaustive coverage for the right level of depth to recall under interview pressure.

Each topic ships at three depth levels:

File	When to read
basic	First read; quick recall before interview
theory	Prep for grilling questions (“why?”, “trade-off?“)
practical	Code snippets, commands, copy-pasteable patterns

Suggested path: skim basic for every Tier 1 topic first, then deep-dive theory + practical on areas the role emphasises. System Design and DSA stay separate because they’re cross-cutting.

Spot an error, gap, or outdated fact? Open an issue or PR.

Tier 1 — core (must know cold)

PostgreSQL MVCC, indexes, isolation, EXPLAIN, partitioning

Redis caching patterns, persistence, cluster, distributed locks

MongoDB schema, aggregation, replica sets, sharding

Elasticsearch inverted index, BM25, mapping, aggregations

TypeScript / Node.js event loop, V8, streams, types

Python GIL, asyncio, Django, FastAPI

Go goroutines, channels, context, sync

Microservices saga, outbox, CDC, service mesh

REST & gRPC HTTP/2, protobuf, idempotency, streaming

GraphQL N+1, dataloader, federation, subscriptions

Kafka partitions, consumer groups, EOS, compaction

Message Queues RabbitMQ, SQS, Redis Streams, NATS

Distributed Systems CAP, Raft, replication, consensus

Networking TCP, HTTP/2/3, TLS, DNS, load balancers

Security OWASP, OAuth, JWT, mTLS, secrets

Testing Strategy unit, integration, contract, load, TDD

Tier 2 — DevOps

AWS EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, IAM, VPC

GCP GKE, Cloud Run, Spanner, BigQuery

Terraform state, modules, workspaces, drift

Pulumi IaC in TS/Python/Go

Docker layers, multi-stage, BuildKit, security

Kubernetes pods, deployments, services, RBAC, HPA

CI/CD pipelines, blue/green, canary, DORA

GitOps Argo CD, Flux, image automation

Observability OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, traces

SRE / SLO error budgets, burn rate, postmortems

Vault secrets, dynamic creds, transit

Ansible playbooks, roles, idempotency

Linux processes, networking, perf tools

Performance profiling, flame graphs, latency

Tier 3 — differentiators (CV stories)

RAG / LLM embeddings, retrieval, reranking, eval

DB Migrations zero-downtime schema changes

ETL Pipelines batch, streaming, CDC, dbt

Cost Optimization cloud cost levers, FinOps

Cross-cutting

System Design framework + worked examples (URL shortener, feed, chat, payments)

DSA patterns, complexity, canonical templates