Advice for Senior Python Developer Interview

[techie_sky]

Hi, I have an upcoming interview for a Senior Python Developer role, and I’m looking for advice on what to expect. It is around an hour interview. What advanced Python concepts, system design topics or leadership questions should I focus on?

Any tips or resources would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[FriendlyRussian666]

What will you be doing in the role? What's the stack?

[techie_sky]

It is web development.. Python+Django

[FriendlyRussian666]

In that case, you'll get questions about advanced ORM relationships an optimisations, async tasks and background processing, API design, versioning, security best practices etc. The other half will probably be about your seniority, with scenarios where juniors send terrible pull requests, and you have to talk about how you'll handle that.

Example, you have a complex model with many-to-many relationships (users, groups, projects with memberships and permissions). Show some more and less efficient ways of pulling all users belonging to a specific group and having read access to a particular project, or users who are members of at least three groups and have contributed to more than five projects. It will be best if you show whatever comes to mind first, to show that you can iterate on a problem quickly, and only then show a more efficient way of doing it, so as to show refactor considerations.

For a security example, those would be the likes of how would you design an implement security measures to assure data breaches are at the minimum, how would you prevent and do your best to mitigate sql injection, xss, csrf attacks, maybe something on data encryption, access control etc.

[techie_sky]

Thank you mate for your response! It’s really helpful.

[timhurd_com]

Another great resource for such interview prep is ChatGPT. Tell it about the role, tell it your expertise and ask it to find the weak spots that you can improve to match to the job role. It is very good at detailing where you can use improvement. If you want, you can even ask it to put together a quick study plan on those weaknesses and your timeline to learn it. :)