These are the exact questions I faced in a real NxtWave interview, cleaned up and organized for your prep.

Personal Background and Team Context
• Tell me something about yourself.
• What is the application you are building in your current role? Describe the problem it solves and the users it serves.
• How are you integrating your team’s workflow with Jira in day-to-day development?

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Python and Algorithms
• LeetCode: Two Sum
State the problem and discuss possible approaches at a high level. No solution code.

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Django Fundamentals
• Explain the Django request and response lifecycle end to end.
• Authentication versus Authorization in Django: define and contrast.
• What is token-based authentication in Django, and where would you use it?
• What is lazy loading in the database or ORM context, and when is it helpful or harmful?
• How do you model a many-to-many relationship between Django tables?
• How would you execute a heavy or long-running operation in a Django application?
• What is Celery, and what are its common use cases with Django?
• How do Django ORM joins work under the hood, and how do you write them cleanly?

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Database Design and Transactions
• What are ACID properties in databases?
• What is atomicity, and why does it matter in transactional systems?
• What is indexing in a database, and when should you add an index?
• How does indexing work internally at a high level?
• How is indexing different from GROUP BY, both in purpose and in execution plans?

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System Design and Data Modeling
• Design a table diagram for a minimal e-commerce application.
Identify core entities, keys, and relationships.
• In that e-commerce design, what types of relationships are maintained between entities?
One-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and where.
• Explain the end-to-end deployment process for a production web application.
Which machines and services do you need? Consider EC2, S3, databases, load balancers, networking, and observability.
• How would you improve API latency in a real service under load?
Think end to end: network, app, database, caching, and deployment.

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Production Practices
• How do you integrate Jira with your development and release pipeline?
Reference issue states, branching strategy, PR reviews, and release notes.
• Where would you add caching in a Django or FastAPI service, and what would you cache?
• How do you choose between synchronous and asynchronous execution paths in a web API?
• What metrics and logs do you monitor to protect latency and error budgets?