+ exact courses I followed)
For most of my career I’ve been a “solid mid-level backend engineer.”
You know the type: good at shipping features, decent with Go, comfortable with microservices… but every time I tried going for a senior position, I hit the same wall:
I could build anything, but I couldn’t explain anything.
System design?
Distributed systems tradeoffs?
Latency budgeting?
Concurrency patterns?
Event-driven architecture reasoning?
Every senior interview somehow turned into an uncomfortable spotlight on things I “knew” but couldn’t articulate.
Last year I decided to change that.
This is the exact path I followed — and how I finally passed my first Senior Backend Engineer interview using a set of Educative courses.
What changed everything for me
I didn’t want bootcamps, Zoom cohorts, or 200-page PDFs.
I wanted:
- short, structured explanations
- interactive diagrams
- hands-on exercises
- real-world examples (not academic bullshit)
This led me to Educative.
It sounds cheesy, but it was the first time I felt like system design and distributed concepts “clicked” instead of just being memorized.
Below is literally the order I studied things and how each piece helped me during real interviews.
1. Grokking the System Design Interview
(Educative’s most famous course for a reason)
I started with this one because it fixed my biggest weakness:
I had no framework to approach a system design interview.
Before:
I improvised, talked too much about implementation details, and got lost in rabbit holes.
After:
I had a clean 4-step process burned into my head:
- Clarify requirements
- Define core components
- Dive into scaling
- Discuss tradeoffs
The course also gave me tangible examples I ended up directly referencing in interviews:
- rate limiting
- consistent hashing
- fan-out strategies
- message queues
- caching layers
- sharding approaches
This single course probably covered 60% of what I needed to pass.
2. Grokking Modern System Design
(The “2024+ version” with way deeper architecture cases)
This one leveled me up from “I can answer system design” to
“I think like a distributed systems engineer.”
Topics that helped me immediately in interviews:
- difference between pull vs push messaging
- when to use gRPC vs REST
- why pub/sub systems fail under backpressure
- designing idempotent consumers
- strategies for replay, retries, dead letter queues
- eventual vs strong consistency tradeoffs
As a Go engineer building microservices — this was gold.
3. System Design: Scalability & Distributed Systems Guide
This course was more theoretical, but in a good way.
It helped me talk like a senior engineer:
Not just what I would build, but why.
Interviewers loved when I could say things like:
“I’d add a write-ahead log here — that way we guarantee durability before acknowledgement.”
or
“This is a classic thundering herd scenario; we should introduce request coalescing.”
This is the stuff that separates mid-level from senior.
4. Grokking Concurrency in Go
Since the role was Go-focused, I needed to sharpen concurrency patterns.
This one covered:
- goroutine orchestration
- worker pools
- pipelines
- channel vs mutex reasoning
- deadlocks / race conditions
- context cancellation patterns
During my real interview I got a question:
“Design a rate limiter in Go.”
I basically answered straight from what I practiced here.
5. Grokking the Behavioral Interview
I underestimated this one hard.
Technical skills got me 70% of the way there —
behavioral confidence finished the job.
This course taught me how to structure stories around:
- conflict
- disagreement
- ownership
- failure
- leadership
- debugging disasters
I reused the same 6–7 stories across every company.
It saved unbelievable amounts of stress.
My interview strategy (that finally worked)
Here’s the process I used to pass:
1) One system design problem per day
I didn’t memorize designs.
I practiced the framework.
2) One backend deep-dive topic per day
Examples:
- rate limiting
- circuit breakers
- gRPC load balancing
- replication
- consensus
- consistent hashing
3) Go-specific prep
Concurrency + memory model + profiling + context.
4) Behavioral stories
I prepared them like flashcards.
5) Mock interviews
No surprise — the more you practice, the more your brain stops panicking.
The moment everything clicked
My successful interview was for a Senior Backend Engineer (Go) role at a product company.
The system design question was:
“Design a real-time event distribution system (like a lightweight pub/sub).
Focus on scalability and reliability.”
This would’ve terrified me three months earlier.
Instead, I walked through:
- fan-out strategies
- designing topic partitions
- consumer groups
- horizontal scaling
- backpressure management
- retry semantics
- idempotency
- monitoring
The interviewer literally said:
“This is exactly the level of clarity we expect from seniors.”
That was the moment I realized I finally broke through.
Exact Educative courses I used (in order)
- Grokking the System Design Interview
- System Design Deep Dive: Real-World Distributed Systems
- Mastering Concurrency in Go
- Grokking the Behavioral Interview
If you follow only these, you already cover 90% of what senior roles expect.
Final thoughts
I’m not a genius.
I didn’t come from FAANG.
I didn’t magically become smarter in a month.
I just finally learned the things that senior engineers are expected to know but never taught directly:
- how to communicate architecture
- how to reason about tradeoffs
- how to think in terms of systems, not functions
- and how to explain decisions clearly
If you’re stuck between mid-level and senior —
this is the exact path I wish someone shared with me earlier.
Top comments (1)
Did you supplement these Educative courses with any other resources (books, repos, mock interviews, etc.) or was this path alone enough to noticeably level up both your Go-specific and general system design skills for the senior interviews?