Python backend interviews cover language internals, async programming, Django or FastAPI, and database access patterns. Below are the most common questions with model answers. Senior: architecture, trade-offs, mentoring, and decision-making.
A regular function computes everything and returns once; a generator suspends at each yield and resumes where it left off, producing values lazily. That means constant memory regardless of how many items are produced, so you can iterate a multi-gigabyte file or an infinite sequence. yield is what turns the function into a state machine the interpreter can pause and resume.
*args collects extra positional arguments into a tuple and **kwargs collects extra keyword arguments into a dict. They are used when a function must accept an arbitrary signature — most often in decorators and wrappers that forward everything to the wrapped callable. The mirror use is unpacking: calling f(*items, **options) spreads a sequence and a mapping into arguments.
Threading gives concurrency within one process and helps only with I/O because of the GIL. Multiprocessing spawns separate interpreters with real parallelism, at the cost of process startup and inter-process communication — the right choice for CPU-bound work. asyncio is single-threaded cooperative concurrency: tasks yield at await points, which scales to tens of thousands of sockets but blocks everything if you call synchronous code inside a coroutine.
A context manager guarantees setup and teardown around a block, which is what with statements use to close files or release locks even when an exception is raised. You implement one either as a class with __enter__ and __exit__, or as a generator decorated with @contextlib.contextmanager that yields once between the setup and cleanup code. The __exit__ method receives exception details and can suppress the exception by returning True.
The Method Resolution Order defines the sequence in which Python searches classes for an attribute, computed by the C3 linearization algorithm. It guarantees that a class always precedes its parents and that the order of base classes is respected, which makes diamond inheritance predictable. super() follows the MRO rather than jumping straight to the parent, which is why cooperative multiple inheritance requires every class in the chain to call super().
N+1 occurs when a queryset returns N objects and each access to a related field triggers its own query. select_related solves it for ForeignKey and OneToOne by performing a SQL JOIN and populating the related object in the same query. prefetch_related handles ManyToMany and reverse relations by running a second query and joining the results in Python, which is why it produces two queries instead of one.
A shallow copy creates a new outer container but keeps references to the same nested objects, so mutating a nested list is visible through both copies. A deep copy recursively duplicates everything, giving full independence at the cost of time and memory. The bug this causes in practice is a mutable default argument or a shared nested config that one caller mutates for everyone.
__repr__ is aimed at developers and should ideally be unambiguous — often something that looks like the expression needed to recreate the object; it is what the REPL and debuggers show. __str__ is aimed at end users and is what print() and str() call, falling back to __repr__ when it is not defined. Implementing __repr__ is the higher-value habit because it makes logs and tracebacks readable.
CPython frees an object as soon as its reference count drops to zero, which makes deallocation immediate and predictable. Because reference counting alone cannot free reference cycles, a generational cyclic garbage collector runs periodically to detect and collect them. Practical consequences: closing resources explicitly is still necessary, and keeping a reference in a cache or a closure is the usual cause of a memory leak.
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