fintual-backend-devops-go / ASSIGNMENT.md
ASSIGNMENT.md
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Backend/DevOps Engineer Interview

A small content service: users, posts, comments, tags. Django + Ninja + Postgres.

Running it locally

Prereqs:

  • mise — manages the Python toolchain and uv.
  • A running PostgreSQL 16 instance on localhost:5432 with a database called backend_devops_interview accessible to postgres/postgres. (Local install, brew install postgresql@16, host-mode docker, whatever you have.)

Steps:

mise install
uv sync
createdb backend_devops_interview        # or however you create it
uv run python manage.py migrate
uv run python manage.py seed
uv run python manage.py runserver

API docs at http://localhost:8000/api/docs.

Seeding writes ~100k posts and ~500k comments. Expect a few minutes.

What the API does

Method Path Description
GET /api/posts Published posts, newest first
GET /api/posts/search?q= Full-text-ish search across title and body
GET /api/posts/by-tag/{slug} Posts carrying a given tag
GET /api/posts/{id} Post detail with comments
POST /api/posts Create a post
POST /api/posts/{id}/comments Add a comment to a post
GET /api/users/{id} User profile with post and comment counts
GET /api/users/find?email= Look up a user by email

The assignment

We want to see how you take a working prototype and turn it into something a team can develop on and operate. Pick the changes that give the strongest signal about how you'd improve this codebase if you owned it. There are three areas we care about:

  1. Developer experience. Getting this running on a fresh laptop is harder than it should be. Make it easier.
  2. Performance. Once the database is seeded, exercise the endpoints. Some of them are slow. Find out why and fix what you can.
  3. Production readiness. This service is a long way from something you'd put behind a load balancer. Move it closer — pick whichever deployment target you'd reach for at work (Helm chart, ECS task def, K8s manifests, Fly, Render, plain Docker + systemd — your call).

Depth beats breadth. Pick 2–3 things and go deep rather than touching ten things shallowly. Write a short NOTES.md covering:

  • What you did and why.
  • What you deliberately didn't do.
  • What you'd do next if you had another day.

Non-goals

  • Authentication / authorization is intentionally absent. If you want to suggest a direction in NOTES.md, great — but no need to implement anything.
  • Test coverage is not what we're grading. The smoke tests are there so you have something to wire into CI.
  • Reshaping the domain model isn't expected. Adjust it if a perf fix needs it; otherwise leave it.

Time

Soft cap of 2–6 hours, depending on your experience and what tooling you have available (AI agents are fine — say so in NOTES.md and include chat transcripts). We're looking at signal, not hours.

Deliverable

Whatever's easy for you to share: a GitHub link, a gitfront link, a git bundle, even git format-patch. Please don't open a PR against this repo.

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