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Senior Java Engineer (Hybrid)
Posted Jun 15, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026
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Likely interview questions for this role
Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.
Behavioral
Walk me through a system you built or maintained that sat on the critical path for a transaction, something where an outage or a bug would have hit customers directly. How did you design it to fail safely?
whether the candidate has real experience with high-stakes, always-on systems and thinks about failure modes, not just happy-path features
Give me an example of taking a high-level business requirement or use case and turning it into a low-level technical design. What did that document or design plan actually include?
whether they can genuinely translate business needs into engineering specs, a core accountability listed in the posting
Tell me about a time you had to estimate the size or effort of a software project and you got it wrong. What happened and what did you change afterward?
honesty and growth around estimation skills, which the posting explicitly calls out
Tell me about a code or design walkthrough you led. How did you handle pushback from someone more senior, or from someone who clearly didn't understand the design?
communication skill and technical leadership under disagreement, since the role includes leading walkthroughs and providing technical guidance
Tell me about a time a stakeholder, maybe a product owner or someone on the business side, asked for something you knew was technically risky or wrong. How did you handle that conversation?
customer-driven service orientation and ability to push back constructively, both called out in the posting
Technical
Tell me about your experience building Spring Boot RESTful APIs on AWS. What does a typical service architecture look like for you, from the API layer down to the data store?
depth of hands-on Java/Spring Boot/AWS experience versus surface familiarity
How have you used AI coding tools like Copilot or Claude Code in your day-to-day development? Where do you trust them and where do you not?
real, specific usage of AI tools versus a vague claim of proficiency
What's your experience with SQL and data modeling in the context of insurance products or policy data? Have you worked with anything like rate tables or eligibility rules engines?
whether the insurance-domain knowledge and SQL skill are real or just listed
How do you approach integrating a new service with existing applications and databases, especially when the integration technology is something the rest of your team hasn't used before?
depth on integration and migration strategy, which the posting names as a required skill area
What testing do you personally write versus what you rely on the team or automation to catch, on a service like this one where correctness really matters?
whether their sense of testing responsibility matches the rigor a critical-path financial system actually needs
Situational
Say you inherit a rating or eligibility service with almost no documentation and you need to change its behavior without breaking downstream sales platforms. How do you approach figuring out what's safe to touch?
ability to reverse-engineer legacy systems and manage risk in a system they don't fully understand yet
Picture a scenario where a change to a shared product data service needs to go out, but three other teams downstream depend on that data and none of them were part of the design conversation. What do you do before you ship it?
stakeholder awareness and communication discipline in a platform-team context where changes ripple outward
Imagine you find a performance or security issue in a service that's currently live and processing policy transactions. It's not on fire yet, but it will be soon. Walk me through what you'd do in the first day and over the following week.
judgment on prioritization and risk management in a system where downtime has real business consequences
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As published by American Family Insurance.
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