+ 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.
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