Study Plan

How to use this

These plans assume you are targeting senior or staff backend roles and that you are starting from a reasonably experienced baseline. They are not meant to be followed rigidly. Use them as a framework and shift time toward whatever you know is your weakest area.

One thing that cuts across all three plans: write your STAR project doc early. It is the single highest-leverage thing you can do before any interview. It feeds your behavioral answers, it improves your resume, and it helps you articulate technical complexity. Do it first.

2-week sprint

You have interviews booked. This is damage control mode. Focus on the highest-return activities only.

Days 1–2: Write your STAR project doc

Before anything else. Pick your two most complex projects. Write out the full STAR narrative for each. This will feed everything else.

Days 3–7: System design core

Do one Hello Interview design per day, starting from the beginning of their curriculum. Prioritize these four: metrics/analytics platform, social feed, payment or booking system, and Google Drive. For each one, write a one-page summary doc afterward. Know Kafka and Redis well enough to use them in any design without hesitation.

Days 3–7 (parallel): Coding warm-up

One LeetCode problem per day alongside the system design work. Focus on heaps and maps. These appear in the majority of problems. If you are rusty on Python, spend the first session getting your environment working and re-familiarizing yourself with heapq and collections.defaultdict.

Days 8–10: Behavioral prep

Write out explicit answers to all six behavioral questions on this site. Write them, do not just think through them. Then practice saying each one out loud at least twice. Look up the company's stated values the night before each interview and map your stories to them.

Days 11–14: Review and mock reps

Reread your Hello Interview summary docs out loud. Do at least one full mock loop: 45 minutes of system design, 45 minutes of coding, back to back. Record yourself if you can stomach it. The goal is to feel the time pressure before the real thing, not during it.

4-week plan

This is the sweet spot for most people. Enough time to build real fluency without the discipline required for an 8-week grind.

Week 1: Foundation

Write your STAR project docs (both projects). Set up your Hello Interview account and do the first two designs. Do not rush them. Write summary docs. Spend one session reviewing the Components page on this site and identifying your weakest areas. Start LeetCode at a gentle pace: two problems, focusing on understanding the approach rather than grinding volume.

Week 2: System design depth

Three Hello Interview designs this week. Focus on the core four if you have not done them yet. Go deep on Kafka and Redis: be able to explain partitioning, consumer groups, cache invalidation, and when each tool is and is not the right choice. Reread your summary docs from week 1 and improve them.

Coding: four problems this week, two on heaps, two on maps/sliding window.

Week 3: Coding intensity + behavioral

Daily coding this week: one problem per day. Mix categories but do not look at the category label before solving. Write out your behavioral answers. Practice them out loud. Do one full behavioral mock session (run through all six questions back to back, timed at 3 to 5 minutes per answer).

Continue Hello Interview: one or two designs depending on your pace.

Week 4: Integration and polish

This week is about combining everything under time pressure. Do at least two full mock loops. Review your Hello Interview summary docs. Look up the specific companies you are interviewing at and identify their stated values. Adjust your behavioral stories to map to those values. Light coding maintenance: one problem per day to stay warm, not to learn new patterns.

8-week plan

You have time to build genuine depth rather than just cramming. Use it. The advantage of 8 weeks is not doing twice as much, it is doing things at a sustainable pace and having time to revisit and reinforce.

Weeks 1–2: Orientation

Write your STAR project docs. Read chapters 1 through 5 of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA). These chapters cover the foundations of how systems scale and will give you the vocabulary to speak fluently in any system design. Do one Hello Interview design per week, no pressure. Start LeetCode at two to three problems per week.

Weeks 3–4: Ramp up

Three Hello Interview designs per week. Focus on understanding each one deeply rather than covering volume. Write summary docs as you go. Start on your behavioral answers. Coding: four to five problems per week, gradually increasing difficulty from easy to medium. Identify your weakest pattern (graphs, dynamic programming, etc.) and spend extra sessions there.

Weeks 5–6: Intensity

This is your hardest stretch. Daily Hello Interview or system design review. Daily coding. Complete your behavioral story bank. Do your first mock interview, ideally with someone who will give you honest feedback. Read Microservice Patterns if you have time, particularly the chapters on sagas and event-driven architecture. These concepts come up regularly at senior and staff level.

Weeks 7–8: Polish and application

Slow down on new material and focus on applying what you know. Do two to three full mock loops per week. Improve your behavioral stories based on feedback. Reread your Hello Interview summary docs. Research each specific company you are targeting: their tech stack, their stated values, any public talks their engineers have given about system design problems they have solved. Make your answers feel tailored, not generic.