Accenture Interview First Technical Round Experience | Java Backend Developer | 4 Years Experience

Accenture Java Backend Interview Experience

The video recounts a first-round technical interview for a Java backend developer role. The presenter lists questions covering project experience, Java, Spring, microservices, Kafka, databases, testing, coding, and AI tools. Most topics are presented as questions rather than answered in detail.

Topics and Questions Covered

• Project and production experience

  • Explain the project architecture, responsibilities, and technology stack.
  • Describe production issues encountered and how they were resolved.

• Security and APIs

  • Explain authentication and authorization, including Spring Security and OAuth2.
  • How do you secure REST APIs with Spring Security and JWT?
  • Explain API versioning and how it avoids breaking existing clients.
  • How would you test a new fraud-detection feature in an existing API while preserving backward compatibility?
  • How do you implement pagination and sorting in REST APIs?
  • How do you handle a microservice failure or HTTP 500 error in production?

• Core Java and Spring

  • What are important Java 17 features, and which ones do you use?
  • What are the differences between HashMap and ConcurrentHashMap, and between == and .equals()?
  • Explain IoC and dependency injection, and how they support loose coupling.
  • Compare @Autowired with creating an object using new.
  • When should you use @Component, @Service, and @Repository?
  • Which Spring Boot version have you used, and how do you handle multiple beans of the same type?

• Microservices and Kafka

  • How do you create and deploy a Spring Boot microservice?
  • How do microservices communicate, and when would you choose Kafka over REST?
  • Why is Kafka used for asynchronous communication?
  • Define Kafka topics, partitions, consumer groups, and offsets.
  • How do you handle duplicate messages, retries, and failed messages?
  • How would you troubleshoot a case where a producer sends 1,000 messages but some are not processed?

• Databases and SQL

  • How do you optimize query performance for a database with millions of records?
  • Explain and resolve the N+1 query problem in Spring Data JPA.
  • Write a query to fetch the second-highest distinct salary from an employee table.

• Testing

  • What are common JUnit annotations?
  • What are the differences between unit and integration testing?
  • What is Mockito, and how do @Mock and @InjectMocks work?

• Coding exercises

  • Count the frequency of each character in a string.
  • Sort a list of employees alphabetically by name using the Stream API.
  • Explain the difference between map and flatMap in Java streams.

• AI coding assistants

  • Have you used GitHub Copilot or another AI coding assistant?
  • How do you use AI tools for development, debugging, or analyzing Jira tickets and Azure stories? Do they save time?

Preparation Emphasis

The presenter highlights the HashMap vs. ConcurrentHashMap distinction, the JPA N+1 problem, and the second-highest-salary SQL query as commonly asked topics. The interview also includes practical, scenario-based questions about production troubleshooting, Kafka message handling, API compatibility, and the candidate’s development workflow.

Main speaker/source: The presenter from the ShiviExplores channel, sharing their account of the Accenture interview.