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Hiring Rubric
Build structured hiring rubrics — defining evaluation dimensions, behavioral interview questions, scoring criteria, and calibration processes that maximize signal and minimize bias.
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senior-backend-engineer.md
Markdown
| 1 | # Hiring Rubric: Senior Backend Engineer |
| 2 | |
| 3 | ## Role Profile |
| 4 | |
| 5 | **Title:** Senior Backend Engineer (L5) |
| 6 | **Team:** Payments Platform, reporting to Engineering Manager |
| 7 | **Level:** Senior IC, no direct reports |
| 8 | **6-month goals:** |
| 9 | 1. Own and ship the ledger reconciliation service (replacing a manual process costing 20 eng-hours/week) |
| 10 | 2. Reduce P95 latency on payment processing endpoints from 800ms to under 200ms |
| 11 | 3. Mentor one mid-level engineer through their first system design project |
| 12 | |
| 13 | ## Evaluation Dimensions |
| 14 | |
| 15 | | Dimension | Weight | Assessed In | |
| 16 | |----------------------------|--------|--------------------------| |
| 17 | | Backend systems depth | 30% | Technical interview | |
| 18 | | System design | 25% | Design interview | |
| 19 | | Debugging & problem-solving| 20% | Technical interview | |
| 20 | | Communication & clarity | 15% | All rounds | |
| 21 | | Mentorship & collaboration | 10% | Behavioral interview | |
| 22 | |
| 23 | ## Scoring Criteria |
| 24 | |
| 25 | ### Backend Systems Depth (30%) |
| 26 | |
| 27 | - **4 - Strong Hire:** Writes correct, production-quality code for the problem. Proactively identifies edge cases (race conditions, failure modes). Discusses tradeoffs of data structures and concurrency approaches without prompting. |
| 28 | - **3 - Hire:** Solves the problem with minor issues. Handles most edge cases when prompted. Explains their approach clearly. |
| 29 | - **2 - Weak:** Reaches a partial solution with hints. Misses concurrency or error-handling concerns. Struggles to compare alternatives. |
| 30 | - **1 - No Hire:** Cannot make meaningful progress. Shows gaps in fundamentals (SQL, HTTP, concurrency) expected at the senior level. |
| 31 | |
| 32 | ### System Design (25%) |
| 33 | |
| 34 | - **4 - Strong Hire:** Structures the design top-down, identifies bottlenecks early, proposes monitoring and failure recovery strategies. Quantifies capacity estimates and names specific technologies with justified reasoning. |
| 35 | - **3 - Hire:** Produces a reasonable architecture covering key components. Addresses scalability when prompted. Makes sound technology choices. |
| 36 | - **2 - Weak:** Designs a working system but misses critical non-functional requirements (fault tolerance, observability). Needs significant guidance. |
| 37 | - **1 - No Hire:** Cannot decompose the problem into services or identify data flow. Design would not survive production traffic. |
| 38 | |
| 39 | ### Debugging & Problem-Solving (20%) |
| 40 | |
| 41 | - **4 - Strong Hire:** Systematically isolates the bug, forms hypotheses, and validates them. Identifies the root cause and proposes a fix plus a preventive measure. |
| 42 | - **3 - Hire:** Finds the bug with a logical approach. May need one hint. Proposes a reasonable fix. |
| 43 | - **2 - Weak:** Uses trial-and-error. Finds the symptom but not the root cause. |
| 44 | - **1 - No Hire:** Cannot form a debugging strategy. Gets stuck without heavy guidance. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | ## Interview Questions |
| 47 | |
| 48 | ### Technical Round — Backend Depth |
| 49 | 1. "Design and implement an idempotent payment processing endpoint that handles retries safely." Follow-up: "How would you test this under concurrent requests?" |
| 50 | 2. "Given this slow SQL query on a 50M-row transactions table, walk me through how you'd diagnose and fix it." Follow-up: "What monitoring would you add to prevent this from recurring?" |
| 51 | |
| 52 | ### Design Round — System Design |
| 53 | 1. "Design a ledger reconciliation system that compares internal records against bank statements daily, flagging discrepancies." Follow-up: "How does this system behave when the bank API is down for 6 hours?" |
| 54 | |
| 55 | ### Behavioral Round — Mentorship & Collaboration |
| 56 | 1. "Tell me about a time you helped a less experienced engineer grow. What did you do, and what was the outcome?" |
| 57 | 2. "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision on your team. How did you handle it, and what happened?" |
| 58 | 3. "Tell me about a production incident where you had to coordinate across teams. What was your role, and what did you learn?" |
| 59 | |
| 60 | ## Scorecard |
| 61 | |
| 62 | ``` |
| 63 | Candidate: _______________ Interviewer: _______________ |
| 64 | Role: Senior Backend Eng Date: _______________ |
| 65 | Round: _______________ |
| 66 | |
| 67 | | Dimension | Score (1-4) | Evidence (required) | |
| 68 | |-----------------------------|-------------|--------------------------------| |
| 69 | | Backend systems depth | | | |
| 70 | | System design | | | |
| 71 | | Debugging & problem-solving | | | |
| 72 | | Communication & clarity | | | |
| 73 | | Mentorship & collaboration | | | |
| 74 | |
| 75 | Overall recommendation: [ ] Strong Hire [ ] Hire [ ] Weak [ ] No Hire |
| 76 | |
| 77 | Key strengths: |
| 78 | Key concerns: |
| 79 | ``` |
| 80 |