Preparing for an interview at Fuku requires a balanced approach of deep technical review and reflection on your past engineering experiences. You should be ready to explain not just how you built something, but why you made specific architectural choices.

We evaluate all Software Engineer candidates across four primary dimensions:

Role-Related Knowledge – This is your technical bread and butter. We expect you to have a deep understanding of your primary programming languages (such as Go or PHP), concurrency patterns, database optimization, and modern cloud infrastructure.

Problem-Solving Ability – We look at how you break down complex, ambiguous problems into manageable components. You should demonstrate structured thinking, ask clarifying questions, and systematically evaluate different solutions.

System Design & Scalability – For senior and staff-level roles, you must demonstrate a strong grasp of distributed systems concepts, including caching, message queues, data replication, and fault tolerance.

Cultural Alignment – We seek engineers who are collaborative, humble, eager to learn, and deeply empathetic toward our users. Showing a strong sense of ownership and a bias for action is critical to succeeding here.

The interview process at Fuku is structured to be rigorous yet transparent, ensuring we evaluate your skills fairly while giving you a clear window into our engineering culture. We move quickly and respect your time throughout the journey.

The process typically begins with an initial recruiter screen to align on your background, career goals, and compensation expectations. Following this, you will complete a technical screen consisting of a live coding session or a practical system design discussion. If you pass this stage, you will move on to the virtual onsite loop, which features deep dives into architecture, coding, product engineering, and behavioral scenarios.

Our engineering philosophy centers on building practical, reliable, and scalable systems. We look for candidates who can write clean code, communicate technical trade-offs clearly, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional partners.

The visual timeline above outlines the typical stages of our interview funnel, starting from your first conversation through to the final decision. Candidates should use this roadmap to pace their preparation, focusing on coding and basic system design early on, and shifting to complex architectural trade-offs and behavioral preparation for the onsite loop. While the exact duration may vary based on team and seniority, we strive to keep the entire process highly communicative and efficient.

To excel in the Fuku interview loop, you need to understand exactly what your interviewers are looking for in each specific session.

System Architecture & Scalability

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to design large-scale backends that remain resilient under heavy load. We want to see how you think about high availability, data consistency, and system boundaries.

Be ready to go over:

• Database Selection – Knowing when to use relational databases versus NoSQL databases, and how to design schemas for scale.
• Asynchronous Processing – Leveraging message brokers (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) to decouple services and handle background tasks.
• Caching & Latency Mitigation – Implementing caching layers effectively without introducing stale data bugs.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Sharding strategies, consensus algorithms (Raft/Paxos), and multi-region deployment trade-offs.

Example scenarios:

• "Design the backend infrastructure for a real-time collaborative workspace."
• "How would you design a metrics collection system that processes millions of events per second with minimal latency?"

Coding Proficiency & Concurrency

During the coding sessions, we evaluate your ability to write clean, idiomatic, and bug-free code. We care about code structure, edge-case handling, and your familiarity with concurrent programming.

Be ready to go over:

• Data Structures – Efficient use of maps, trees, heaps, and graphs.
• Concurrency Patterns – Utilizing goroutines, channels, mutexes, and thread pools safely.
• Testing & Maintainability – Structuring your code so that it is easily testable and readable by other engineers.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Lock-free data structures, memory management, and garbage collection tuning.

Example scenarios:

• "Implement a thread-safe rate limiter that can be configured with different limits per API endpoint."
• "Write a concurrent worker pool that processes a queue of tasks and handles failures gracefully."

Product Delivery & API Design

This area evaluates your ability to bridge the gap between technical implementation and product requirements. We want to see how you design APIs that are intuitive, secure, and performant.

Be ready to go over:

• REST & gRPC Design – Choosing the right communication protocols and designing clean resource paths.
• Idempotency & Reliability – Designing APIs that can safely retry failed operations without side effects.
• Security & Authentication – Implementing proper authorization, rate limiting, and input validation.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a public-facing API for an e-commerce checkout flow, ensuring payments are never processed twice."
• "How would you design a versioning strategy for an API used by millions of mobile clients?"